Roy - Scenario 1

Roy - Scenario 1

Roys girlfriend Emma has decided that they should do something special together this weekend instead of just hanging around at home. Emma propose that they go to a museum, something they haven’t done together before, and she suggests that they go to Fotografiska muséet. Roy isn’t too happy about going to the museum, he feels uncertain about whether it would be fun, because for Roy museums are something you had to go to back in grade school. Roy would rather go to the movies and see “Guardians of the Galaxy”, a movie he has been looking forward to seeing for some time. Going to the movies feels more like something that will assuredly be fun, whereas a museum feels way more uncertain. After Emmas persistence in her suggestion, Roy decides to look up what a visit to Fotografiska would mean.

Roy finds the museum website, which displays pictures from what he presumes are the exhibitions, these don’t really affect him that much, right now he’s focused on finding out where the museum is, what you do there, opening hours (hoping it will be closed!), prices and what it offers. He has to click around the website quite a lot to find all the information, but in the end he feels that some of his questions are left unanswered, mainly what the visit would offer and what you really do there.

Roy begs Emma to go to the movies, but she counters his proposal by telling him they went to the movies two weeks ago to see a movie of his choice! Roy gives in and they go to the Fotografiska. At the musuem, Roy is positively surprised and he and Emma spend almost the entire day there. Seeing the images in this environment feels entirely different from watching them on the website. He and Emma talks about the visit all day and both agree that it was worthwhile. Roy feels like he certainly would visit again if there was some new exhibit or perhaps even visit another museum. Although he feels more positive towards museum visits now, he feels that visiting another museum might not be as rewarding as this one was.

Overall, Roy is positive about the experience, but he feels that the the way to the actual museum was hard. He felt like his initial investigation of the museum didn’t do it justice and that easier access to information about not only that museum, but all museums in the area, might persuade him to visit more. He feels his newfound interest for museums is decreased because of the cumbersome activity of researching the museums.

Lena - Scenario 2

It is 7 o´clock friday morning. Lena is reading the newspaper in her small apartment in Kristineberg while having breakfast. She is in good spirits since it´s almost weekend and she feels like she could really need to take her mind of work for a while and this weekend is one where she doesn´t have any plans at all. In the newspaper she sees an advertisement for the latest exhibition at Naturhistoriska riksmuseet. It reminds her that it has been quite a long time since she last visited a museum. She reflects upon this for a while. She remembers that she used to go a lot to museums when she was younger and she has always had an interest for culture. She points out to herself that it must be because of how hard she has been working the past few years. A thought comes to her mind that maybe it is time for her to make her comeback as a museum visitor. She arguments with herself that she doesn’t have any plans and maybe a visit to the museum would be a nice and relaxing way for her to get her mind off work.

She is awakened from her daydream by the phone ringing. She answers her phone and hears the voice of her manager. She can tell right away by the tone of the managers voice that this won´t be good news. Just as she predicted her manager apologetically asks her to come in and work on saturday.

She puts down the phone, sighs and realizes that her weekend just became 50% shorter. She glances down at the ad for Naturhistoriska riksmuseet and knows that the only time she will have a chance to go there this weekend will be on sunday. But the extra workday has completely ruined her mood and she decides that sunday will be a day where she stays at home and watches a whole season of the big bang theory and eats ice cream.  

Lena - Scenario 1

Lena - Scenario 1

Lena has a date and her date wants to go to a museum of her choice. This makes Lena a little uncomfortable, but she wants to make a good first impression, so she agrees. But Lena doesn’t go to a lot of museums and doesn’t know which one to go to. She decides to look for information about different museums in the Stockholm area. She decides to use the internet to find information, but finds it really hard and tiresome to find information about the museums and what they offer. She feels like she just gets a bunch of links to the museum websites which take time to navigate and some of which are even too hard to find relevant information about.

In the end she decides to just go to the Naturhistoriska riksmuséet, where she has been before, but she doesn’t feel like it’s the optimal choice for the purpose. She and her date find that they have quite a good time at the museum, especially Lena is positively surprised, she didn’t expect it to be so enlightening and fun to see the exhibits.

She finds the museum experience something she’d like to do again, but perhaps at a different museum, and she’d like it to be easier to find a new museum and relevant information about its exhibits. She’d like this to be something you could find on facebook or a single website or app which has information about all museums in the area easily available. She wants it to tell her about the museum, what exhibits there currently are and other information that might be relevant or interesting.

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.

Summary of interviews

We went to Tekniska Museet to make our interviews. The first conclusion that we could draw was that people generally haven’t really reflected on their museum habits. It felt like many of the answers to our questions were about things that people have not thought about very much. E.g. when we asked the question “What would make you go to museums more often?” Many of the answers felt as if the person didn’t really know what would make him or her go to museums. The typical answer to this question was something like “More exhibitions I guess”. This tells us that people don’t reflect a lot about specific reasons to visit a museum.

Another question that we asked was if people were willing to use their smartphones more interactively at the museum. The answer to this question varied a lot between people of different ages. Older people thought that using the smartphone at the museum would be a distraction for them and that it would take away their attention from the exhibition. Younger people were more willing to use their smartphones if it served a fruitful purpose for the visit. “QR-codes are lame” was one of the answers to this question but the same person also admitted that it could be interesting if it served an extraordinary purpose.

We interviewed some people who were in Stockholm on vacation and was visiting the museum. We got the feeling that it is easier to go to museums if you are on vacation. It is a way to experience the culture in the city you are in and you can learn a lot about the place you are visiting. You are also more likely to go to a museum while travelling since you already have mindset to go out and do things and to see and experience a lot of culture that is different from your own.
We also learnt that people usually visit a museum together with one or two friends rather than go alone. Most of the people we interviewed were at the museum together with friends. Not many visitors were there alone or in a larger group.

In final conclusion we think that we have learnt a lot from our visit to the museum not only from the interviews but also from our own experiences of the exhibitions. Since we ourselves are all in our specified target group we believe that we can use both the interviews and a lot of our own impressions when coming up with a concept that will make people go to museums more often.

Interview Björn Lundkvist

Interview 22/9 at tekniska museet.

Interviewee: 25 year old male german tourist

How often do you go to museums?

• I don´t go very often, maybe only once or twice a year.

Why do you go to museums?

• Usually I want to learn something of some special subject like a period of art or historic events.

What would make you go to museums more often?

• Hard question.. Interactivity is one thing but I guess more museums with different topics would interest me.

Would you be interested to use your smartphone interactively at the museum if it was possible?

• Yes if I had a smartphone

Do you usually go to museums alone or in a group?

• Usually with a friend. Never in a group.

Do you have any special memories of a museum visit that you liked?

• No I don´t think I have.

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.