State-of-the-art analysis summary

Our state-of-the-art analysis can be divided into two different groups. One with applications that you use before your visit and one with interactive technology during your visit. Our target group (people who usually do not visit a museum) must recieve information before the visit to attract them and we also conclude that it might benefit if there were some kind of fun, interactive way to experience the exhibits.

We looked at Tekniska Museets website, Rabble and Event planners to get an insight how one might attract our target group to visit. From our analyses we draw the conclusion there might be a need for an information platform that does not send the user to other webpages that may or may not be easy to use, but instead displays relevant information in a visually appealing fashion.

Rabble uses special offers to attract people to different restaurants, stores and experiences, such as massages. We think that this could work to attract people to museums but not with the discount offers, but rather through relevant information.

There are a lot of different event planner websites, some working better than others. One that stood out was visitstockholm.se which had a clean and easy way to find information about specific events. We think that this type of design could be implemented more in future web pages since it gives a very good first impression to the user.

Another perspective of attracting people to museums is the actual interactive technology at the museums. We analyzed an audio guide and an interactive smell game to get a better insight interactive technology.

The visitors at the museum are usually not aware of the existence of the audio guides or the games that exists. They are introduced to the concepts when they arrive. We think that it might be a good idea to highlight these technologies at a web page or an app to attract more visitors.

Our project is starting to head more towards some kind of technology that is combining solutions to attract people to the museums with interactive solutions at the museums. We have begun brainstorming about combining existing “games” at the museums with an easy to use mobile application that also contains relevant information about the museums.

State of the art analysis - Björn Lundkvist

I have chosen to analyse the different eventplanners for Stockholm. By eventplanners I mean websites and apps where you can find out what is going on in Stockholm. At first I thought “This will be great, event planners must be one of the most interactive kind of sites you can come around”. It took me about 5 minutes of searching on google and google play to realize that the state of the art eventplanner sites are not very good when it comes to interaction. Firstly most of the websites are ugly. The first feeling that I got from many of these sites was a feeling of being overwhelmed with text and information. It made me want to close down the sites immediately. The sites tried to force information on me that I wasn´t at all interested in. It was like being washed over by a great wave. My goal was to find information about what different kinds of things were going on at museums in Stockholm. I wasn´t at all interested in the latest talk shows or which bar is hip at the moment. Here are some example of websites with too much information that you don´t want: http://www.alltomstockholm.se/, http://www.yelp.se/events

Once you manage to get past the first shock of letting your brain process the sea of information that is thrown at you, you finally get a chance to look up the menus. Most of these sites have pretty good and simple menus and you can easily find where to look for events at museums. But I think the first impression is very important and most of these websites are lacking in that area.

The most interactive and also the most appealing from a design perspective was this website: http://www.visitstockholm.com/

I think it is good because the first thing you see is warm and very inviting picture of Stockholm by the water. You then see the menu. It is a simple menu where you can choose what information you are looking for. After making your choice on the menu you get sent to a submenu where you can narrow your search down to find more specifically what you are looking for. I chose culture and history for example. You the get to see images of what is going on around stockholm in your search category. You can click on these images to find out more about that particular event and watch videos asociated with the event. i think this is a good and inviting way to find out what you can do around stockholm. It is user friendly and simple unlike most the other sites that just try to throw tons of information in your face.

Something I would like to see more of on these websites is videos. I think many of the museums would benefit from having an introductory video on their page showing the current exhibitions so the visitor can get a glimpse of what you can experience at the museum. For example when I visited tekniska museet along with my fellow groupmates we saw the exhibition Game on. It was a very interesting exhibition where you could play all sorts of different videogames. If I had seen a short video with a presentation of that exhibition I am sure I would have gone there earlier. It was truly an incredibly fun exhibiton but I hadn´t heard of that exhibition at all beforehand. This makes me think that museums should work on advertising themselves more so that they can reach out to people. I think that one of the reasons for people not going to museums is that people simply are unsure of what to expect from the museum. People never have a clue about what is going on and therefore they never go.

Lastly I would like to point out that I couldn´t find any good apps whatsoever for finding events in Stockholm. This is something that confuses me since there are so many websites for events. Perhaps I am bad at finding apps or maybe there simply aren´t any good apps out there. I believe that there must be apps out there though but since I could not find these apps it makes me think that the apps should be easier to find and access.    

Rabble – State-of-the-art analysis

Rabble is a smartphone app designed to notify its user of discounts or sales and deals nearby. It uses GPS to see how close they are and display relevant information about the sales such as what it applies to and for how long. Rabble has been used as well by companies to make their locales more visible to the target group (smartphone users).

I'm thinking that a similar solution could be applied to our target group, people who don't go to museums often. I Rabble helps people find new places to do consuming, then you proboably could make an app to help people find museums and information about them.

The idea would be something along the lines of an app which either notifies the user of discounts on certain museums and exhibits, or instead act as an easy way to get an overview of the museums nearby and what they offer.

Problems for Rabble’s users might be that they often get what they need, but few times get exactly what they’re looking for. I might, for example, be interested in a certain kind of headset for my phone, and find that Rabble has a discount on a similar, but decidedly different headset. I will get something similar, but not exactly what I wanted in the first place. For consumers this might not always be a problem, but if we would apply it to an app for museums, it might work differently!

Museums, as opposed to consumer electronics, are vastly differenty. No two museums are the same! You can’t expect to reach out to people who might be interested in a certain exhibit at a certain museum by ordering them after which have a discount or which are near you. You would rather have to order the museums after preference or similar attributes at first.

State-Of-The-Art Analysis by Alexis

What is it?

Some museums (like ABBA The Museum in Stockholm) offer their visitors a so called “Audio Guide” as a complement for the exhibition. It is a device with a small speaker that plays a certain  recorded scripted message when it comes in contact with a special pad. These pads are located at certain points of the exhibition and give the owner of a Audioguide some extra information about the object near the pad. The voice on the Audioguide is usually someone famous. For instance, at ABBA The Musem it is the members of ABBA themselves who have recorded the material for the Audioguides. 

Target group?

The museum aim to target people who want to know more about the exhibition and are willing to pay a little extra for this privilege. So in the ABBA-case they aim to target the fans who might know alot about ABBA, but want the exclusive more personal information.

Good stuff

The Audioguide offers a personal guide of the museum and (in some cases) the privilege to listen to a famous person. It interacts with the users and serves as a complement to the objects in the museum. It gives the user an additional sense to experience the exhibition which improves the amount of information you obtain. It can create a natural path through the museum and therefore counter jams of visitors (provided enough people have Audioguides. 

Bad stuff

However, it can ruin a bit of the experience when going to a museum. People usually go to museums in groups so they can share the experience. But the Audioguide can interrupt the interaction within the group because of the attention it demands from its user. It also limits the users freedom at the exhibition since the placements of the pads create a route one might feel obligated to travel. Though it usually is quite small and light, it can be a drag to carry the device during the entire visit. It seems that most museums demands a additional fee for the Audioguide which makes it into a privilege that not everyone can afford.

State-Of-The-Art Analysis by Emil

Tekniska Museet - Usability on Webpage
I'm going to try to do a state-of-the-art analysis of the Tekniska Museum webpage. First, I'm briefly going to analyze who the target group is for the webpage, and who actually uses it. Second, I'm going to analyze what worked well, and what didn't work well based on my own experience and based on a test with assigned tasks I asked a testperson to do. Last, I will present the tasks and results that I assigned to the testperson together with screenshots of the website.

Who is the target group for the webpage?
From what I understand from using the webpage myself, it’s relatively easy to find basic information of the museum, such as opening hours, prices, exhibitions and so on. It’s harder to find what else this page contains, such as questions you can ask to the staff, and information about, for example, inventors.

  Therefore I believe that the target group the developers had in mind for this page probably is a medium technical skilled person, a person that is used to more interactive webpages and links. It’s probably persons between ages 15-50 that can find information from the website with ease the first time they visit them since I assume that these people use highly interactive technology daily.

Who is using the webpage?
Those who actually use the webpage are probably, for the most part, parents with small children and maybe teachers who's looking for information about visits from schools. I would imagine that the former has more experience in using these kind of website, and that the latter are having a harder time with the webpage. (Presumably because I think that they for the most part are older and non technical...). I also think that the people in the target group fits into the users of the webpage, though the youngsters might use the app instead or as a compliment.

What is working well on the site?
There is easy access to most of the site in just a few clicks! The top menu is the shortcut to almost everything that possibly would want to find. This was proved in the test I did with a test person.
  The front page is presenting all the relevant information that you need, though there is a lot of links and pictures which could drag attention and confuse the user from concentrating on his/hers assigned tasks.

What is working bad?
Things that is not working well on the page is the search function which isn’t presenting the results in a clear way. The user has to scroll down on the resulting page to find more results than the two that are shown directly after the search. This wasn’t obvious the first time I and my testperson used the search function.
  Another thing, which I discovered from the test tasks, is the questions that you can ask to a specific exhibition. The design here is clearly not thought through and it was hard to see where the questions were, and where the user could ask a question himself.
  The font and the titles on some pages made it hard to see what and when information was presented, as in the example with the exhibition questions.
  Also, as the test showed, the top menu wasn't designed for a small computer screen like mine. There was no indication that you could scroll down on the extended menu to get more accessible links. You can see picture examples of this in the task test below.

Tasks for the test person:
1. Find the opening hours.
This task was easy. The test person found the opening hours in just two clicks. There was a direct link from the top of the webpage, but hidden in the top menu. It can be accessed as shown in the picture. (The opening hours is displayed at the bottom of the page at all times, so you can always scroll down to find them.)




2. Find future exhibitions.
This task was also relatively easy for the test person to achieve. She found a link for this information from the same top menu as the opening hours could be accessed . See picture above (link is down to the left).

3. Find the GAME ON exhibition and write them a question.
As previously, the test person put the mouse over the “Besöka” button on the top menu to get the extended options for that choice. When you click on “Utställningar” you get to this view:



She then clicked on the GAME ON picture to get to the GAME ON exhibition, and the view changed to this:



After some trouble, she managed to find the questionnaire at the bottom of this page. But it was hard to see when the questions started and that the text you saw actually was user generated questions. In the picture below the user generated questions can be seen at the bottom.



It was a long scroll down until the questionnaire showed up, and this was hard to understand for user due to the design of this page.

4 Find information about swedish inventors.
This task showed to be the most difficult one. This was probably due to a design problem on the extended view from the top menu.
  This is how the menu looks like when you move the mouse over the “Veta mer” button at the top:



As you can see, the menu doesn’t show swedish inventors. But if you scroll down while keeping the mouse on the extended menu, you’ll notice that there are more clickable options on this menu. One of those is directing you to the swedish inventors page. It took some time until the test person found out that this was possible. Instead of scrolling down on this menu she tried to search for “svenska uppfinnare”. The search result presented the link “svenska uppfinnare” as the third result, which was not presented until you scrolled down on the webpage.



(this is the search result for “svenska uppfinnare”. The link to the page “svenska uppfinnare” is just below the second result visible on the screen. The test person did scroll down, but didn’t see the link. She continued to search for the inventor page using different links and methods for a while until she noticed that it was accessible in the “Veta mer” menu as described above.)

5. Can you buy food at the museum?
This task was also easy for the subject to find. It was accessible from the top menu and she arrived to the right page in just 2 clicks.

6. Can you buy SL-tickets at the museum?
The last and final task went smoothly aswell. She first went to the Ticket page, but here there was only information about the museum tickets. She then went to the “Hitta hit” page where there was information about the museum selling SL-tickets. This information is also presented in the “Butik” page but the user never thought of going there.

/ Emil