Category Archives: CH 3.0

A Very Happy & Open Birthday for the Pen

lisa-pen-table-pic

Today marks the first birthday of our beloved Pen. It’s been an amazing year, filled will many iterations, updates, and above all, visits! Today is a celebration of the Pen, but also of all of our amazing partners whose continued support have helped to make the Pen a reality. So I’d like to start with a special thank you first and foremost to Bloomberg Philanthropies for their generous support of our vision from the start, and to all of our team partners at Sistel Networks, GE, Undercurrent, Local Projects, and Tellart.

Updates

Over the course of the past year, we’ve been hard at work, making the Pen Experience at Cooper Hewitt the best it can be. Right after we launched the Pen, we immediately realized there was quite a bit of work to do behind the scenes so that our Visitor Experience staff could better deal with deploying the Pen, and so that our visitors have the best experience possible.

Here are some highlights:

Redesigning post-purchase touchpoints – We quickly realized that our ticket purchase flow needed to be better. This article goes over how we tried to make improvements so that visitors would have a more streamlined experience at the Visitor Experience desk and afterwards.

Exporting your visits – The idea of “downloading” your data seemed like an obvious necessity. It’s always nice to be able to “get all your stuff.” Aaron built a download tool that archives all the things you collected or created and packages it in a nice browser friendly format. (Affectionately known as parallel-visit)

Improving Back-of-House Interactions – We spent a lot of time behind the visitor services desk trying to understand where the pain points were. This is an ongoing effort, which we have iterated on numerous times over the year, but this post recounts the first major change we made, and it made all the difference.

Collecting all the things – We realized pretty quickly that visitors might want to extend their experience after they’ve visited, or more simply,  save things on our website. So we added the idea of a “shoebox” so that visitors to our website could save objects, just as if they had a Pen and were in our galleries.

Label Writer – In order to deploy and rotate new exhibitions and objects, Sam built an Android-based application that allows our exhibition staff to easily program our NFC based wall labels. This tool means any staff member can walk around with an Android device and reprogram any wall label using our API. Cool!

Improving visitor information with paper – Onboarding new visitors is a critical component. We’ve since iterated on this design, but the basic concept is still there–hand out postcards with visual information about how to use the Pen. It works.

Visual consistency – This has more to do with our collection’s website, but it applies to the Pen as well, in that it helps maintain a consistent look and feel for our visitors during their post visit. This was a major overhaul of the collections website that we think makes things much easier to understand and helps provide a more cohesive experience across all our digital and physical platforms.

Iterating the Post-Visit Experience – Another major improvement to our post-visit end of things. We changed the basic ticket design so that visitors would be more likely to find their way to their stuff, and we redesigned what it looks like when they get there.

Press and hold to save your visit – This is another experimental deployment where we are trying to find out if a new component of our visitor experience is helpful or confusing.

On Exhibitions and Iterations – Sam summarizes the rollout of a major exhibition and the changes we’ve had to make in order to cope with a complex exhibition.

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms – Lisa makes her Labs debut with this excellent article on how we are changing our video production workflow and what that means when someone collects an object in our galleries that contains video content.

The Big Numbers

Back in August we published some initial numbers. Here are the high level updates.

Here are some of the numbers we reported in August 2015:

  • March 10 to August 10 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 62,015
  • March 10 to August 10 total objects collected – 1,394,030
  • March 10 to August 10 total visitor-made designs saved – 54,029
  • March 10 to August 10 mean zero collection rate – 26.7%
  • March 10 to August 10 mean time on campus – 99.56 minutes
  • March 10 to August 10 post visit website retrieval rate – 33.8%

And here are the latest numbers from March 10, 2015 through March 9, 2016

  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 154,812
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total objects collected – 3,972,359
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total visitor-made designs saved – 122,655
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean zero collection rate – 23.8%
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean time on campus – 110.63 minutes
  • Feb 25, 2016 to March 9, 2016 post visit website retrieval rate – 28.02%

That last number is interesting. A few weeks ago we added some new code to our backend system to better track this data point. Previously we had relied on Google Analytics to tell us what percentage of visitors access their post visit website, but we found this to be pretty inaccurate. It didn’t account for multiple access to the same visit by multiple users (think social sharing of a visit) and so the number was typically higher than what we thought reflected reality.

So, we are now tracking a visit page’s “first access” in code and storing that value as a timestamp. This means we now have a very accurate picture of our post visit website retrieval rate and we are also able to easily tell how much time there is between the beginning of a visit and the first access of the visit website–currently at about 1 day and 10 hours on average.

The Pen generates a massive amount of data. So, we decided to publish some of the higher level statistics on a public webpage which you can always check in on at https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/stats. This page reports daily and includes a few basic stats including a list of the most popular objects of all time. Yes, it’s the staircase models. They’ve been the frontrunners since we launched.

Those staircase models!

Those staircase models!

As you can see, we are just about to hit the 4 million objects collected mark. This is pretty significant and it means that our visitors on average have used the Pen to collect 26 objects per visit.

But it’s hard to gain a real sense of what’s going on if you just look at the high level numbers, so lets track some things over time. Below is a chart that shows objects collected by day for the last year.

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Objects collected by day since March 10, 2015

On the right you can easily see a big jump. This corresponds with the opening of the exhibition Beauty–Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. It’s partly due to increased visitation following the opening, but what’s really going on here is a heavy use of object bundling. If you follow this blog, you’ll have recently read the post by Sam where he talks about the need to bundle many objects on one tag. This means that when a visitor taps his or her pen on a tag, they very often collect multiple objects. Beauty makes heavy use of this feature, bundling a dozen or so objects per tag in many cases and resulting in a dramatic increase in collected objects per day.

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

We can easily see that this, is in fact, what is happening if we look at our daily pen checkouts. Here we see a reasonable increase in checkouts following the launch of Beauty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the number of objects being collected each day.

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Immersion room creations by day since March 10, 2015

Above is a chart that shows how many designs were created in the immersion room each day over the past year. It’s also going to be directly connected to the number of visitors we have, but it’s interesting to see the mass of it along this period of time. The immersion room is one of our more popular interactive installations and it has been on view since we launched. So it’s not a big surprise it has a pretty steady curve to it. Also, keep in mind that this is only representative of “things saved” as we are not tracking the thousands of drawings that visitors make and walk away from.

We can slice and dice the Pen data all we want. I suppose we could take requests. But I have a better idea.

Open Data

Today we are opening up the Pen Data. This means a number of things, so listen closely.

  1. The data we are releasing is an anonymized and obfuscated version of some of the actual data.
  2. If you saved your visit to an account within thirty days of this post (and future data updates) we won’t include your data in this public release.
  3. This data is being licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial. This means a company can’t use this data for commercial purposes.
  4. The data we are releasing today is meant to be used in conjunction with out public domain collection metadata or our public API.

The data we are releasing is meant to facilitate the development of an understanding of Cooper Hewitt, its collection and interactive experiences. The idea here is that designers, artists, researchers and data analysts will have easy access to the data generated by the Pen and will be able to analyze  and create data visualizations so that we can better understand the impact our in-gallery technology has on visitors.

We believe there is a lot more going on in our galleries than we might currently understand. Visitors are spending incredible amounts of time at our interactive tables, and have been using the Pen in ways we hadn’t originally thought of. For example, we know that some visitors (children especial) try to collect every single object on view. We call these our treasure hunters. We also know that a percentage of our visitors take a pen and don’t use it to collect anything at all, though they tend to use the stylus end quite a bit. Through careful analysis of this kind of data, we believe that we will be able to begin to uncover new behavior patterns and aspects of “collecting” we haven’t yet discovered.

If you fit this category and are curious enough to take our data for a spin, please get in touch, we’d love to see what you create!

On Exhibitions and Iterations

Since reopening in December 2014, we’ve found that the coming opening of an exhibition is a big driver of iteration. The work involved in preparing an exhibition involves the whole museum and is one of the most coordinated and planned-out things we do, and because of this, new exhibitions push us to improve in a number of ways.

First, new exhibitions can highlight existing gaps or inefficiencies in our systems. Our tagging tool, for example, always sees a round of bug fixes or new features before an exhibition because it coincides with a time when it will see heavy use. Second, exhibitions present us with new technical challenges. Objects in the Heatherwick exhibition, for example, were displayed in the galleries grouped into “projects,” which is also how we wanted users to collect them with their Pens and view them on the website. To accomplish this we had to figure out a way that TMS, our collections management software, could store both the individual objects (for internal purposes) and the grouped projects (which would hold all the public-facing images and text), and figure out how to see that through to the website in a way that made registrars, curators and ourselves comfortable. Finally, a new exhibition can present an opportunity for experimentation. David Adjaye Selects gave us the opportunity to scale up Object Phone, a telephone-based riff on the audio guide, which originally started as a small, rough prototype.

Last week was the opening of our triennial exhibition “Beauty,” which similarly presented us with a number of technical challenges and opportunities to experiment. In this post I’ll share some of those challenges and the work we did to approach them.

Collecting Exhibition Text

Triennial's wall text, with the collect icon in the lower-right corner

Triennial’s wall text, with the collect icon in the lower-right corner

Since the beginning of the pen project we’ve been saying that the Pens don’t just have to collect objects. Aaron and Seb wrote in their paper on the project that “nothing would prevent the museum from allowing visitors to ‘collect’ individual designers, entire exhibitions or even architectural elements from the building itself in the future.” To that end, we’ve experimented with collecting shop items and decided that with the triennial we would allow visitors to collect exhibition text as well.

Exhibition text (in museum argot, “A-Panel” is the main text at the beginning of an exhibition and “B-Panel” are any additional texts you might find along the way) makes total sense as something that a visitor should be able to remember for later. It explains and contextualizes an exhibition’s goals, contents and organization. We’ve had the text on our collections since we reopened but it took a few clicks to get through from a visitor’s post-visit website. Now, the text will be right there alongside all of a visitor’s objects.

The exhibition text on a post-visit website

The exhibition text on a post-visit website

The open-ended part of this is what visitors will expect when they collect an “exhibition.” We installed the collection points with no helper text, i.e. it doesn’t say “press here to collect this exhibition’s text.” We think it’s clear that the crosshairs refer to the text, but one of our original ideas was that we could have a way for the visitor to automatically collect every object in the exhibition and I wonder if that might be the implied function of the text tag. We will have to observe and adapt accordingly on that point.

Videos Instead of Images

When we first added videos to our collections site, we found that the fastest way to accomplish what we needed was to use TMS for relating videos to objects but use custom software for the formatting and uploading of the videos. We generate four versions of every video file — subtitled and not subtitled at two resolutions each — which we use in the galleries, on the tables and on the website. One of the weaknesses of this pipeline is that because the videos don’t live in the usual asset repository the way all of our images do, the link between TMS and the actual file’s location is made by nothing more than a “magic string” and a bit of guesswork. This makes it difficult to work with the video records in TMS: users get no preview and it can be difficult to know which video ID refers to which specific video. All of this is something we’ll be taking another look at in the near future, but there is one small chunk of this problem we approached in advance of the Triennial: how to make our website show the video in place of the primary image if it would be more appropriate to do so.

Here’s an example. Daniel Brown’s On Growth and Form is an animation on display in the Triennial. Before, it would have looked like this — the primary image is a still rendering that has been added in TMS, and the video appears as related content further down the page.

growthandform

What we did is to say if the object is itself a video, animation or other screen-based media and we have an associated video record linked to the object, remove the primary image and put the video there instead. That looks like this:

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 3.33.50 PM

Like all good iterations, this one opened up a bunch of next steps. First, we need to figure out how to add videos into our main digital asset pipeline so that the guesswork can be removed from picking primary videos and a curator or image specialist can select it as “primary” the same way they would do with an image. Next, it brought up an item that’s been on the backburner for a while, which is a better way to display alternate images of an object. Currently, they have their own page, which gets the job done, but it would be nice to present some alternate views on the main object page as well.

Just a Reflektor Sandbox

It's fun!

It’s fun!

We had a great opportunity to do some experimentation on our collections site due to the inclusion of Aaron Koblin and Vincent Morisset’s interactive video for Arcade Fire’s Just a Reflektor. The project’s source code is already available online and contains a “sandbox” environment, a tool that demonstrates some of the interactive visual effects created for the music video in a fun, open-ended environment. We were able to quickly adapt the sandbox’s source code to fit on our collections site so that visitors who collect the video with their Pen will be able to explore a more barebones version of the final interactive piece. You can check that out here.

Fully Loaded Labels

When we were working on the Pen prototypes, we tried six different NFC tags before getting to the one that met all of our requirements. We ended up with these NTAG203 tags whose combination of size and antenna design made them work well with our Pens and our wall labels. Their onboard memory of 144 bytes, combined with the system we devised for encoding collection data on them, meant that we could store a maximum of 11 objects on a tag. Of course we didn’t see that ever being a problem… until it was. The labels in the triennial exhibition are grouped by designer, not by object, and in some cases we have 35 objects from a designer on display that all need to be collected with one Pen press. There were two solutions: find tags with more memory (aka “throw more hardware at it”) or figure out a new way to encode the tags using fewer bytes and update the codebase to support both the new and old ways (aka “maintenance nightmare”). Fortunately for us, the NTAG216 series of tags have become more commonly available in the past year, which feature 888 bytes of memory, enough for around 70 objects on a tag. After a few rounds of end-to-end testing (writing the tag, collecting it with a pen and having it show up on the post-visit website), we rolled the new tags out to the galleries for the dozen or so “high capacity” labels.

The new tag (smaller, on the left) and the old tag (right)

The new tag (smaller, on the left) and the old tag (right)

The most interesting iteration that’s been made overall, I think, is how our exhibition workflow has changed over time to accommodate the Pen. With each new exhibition, we take what sneaked up on us the last time and try to anticipate it. As the most recent exhibition, Beauty’s timeline included more digitally-focused milestones from the outset than any other exhibition yet. Not only did this allow us to anticipate the tag capacity issue many months in advance, but it also gave us more time to double check and fix small problems in the days before opening and gave us more time to try new, experimental approaches to the collections website and post-visit experience. We’re all excited to keep this momentum going as work ramps up on the next exhibitions!

 

Iterating the “Post-Visit Experience”

The final phase of a visitor’s experience at Cooper Hewitt, after they’ve left the museum, is what we call the “post-visit experience.” Introduced along with the Pen in March, it is a personalized website that displays a visitor’s interactions with the museum as a grid of images, including objects they collected from the galleries and wallpapers they created in the Immersion Room.

Our focus leading up to its launch was just to have it working, and as such, some of the details of a visitor’s experience with the application were overlooked. As a result of this, our theoretically simple interface became cluttered with extra buttons, calls to action and explanatory texts. In this post, I’ll present the experience as it existed before and describe some of the steps we took in the past month to iterate on the post-visit experience.

The “Before” Experience

ticket_old

First, let’s walk through the experience as it existed up until this week. The post-visit begins when a visitor accesses their personal website, which they could do by going to a URL on their physical ticket. On the ticket above, that URL is https://cprhw.tt/v/brr6. The domain is our “URL shortener,” https://cprhw.tt, followed by /v/ to indicate a visit (the shortener also supports /o/ for objects or /p/ for people), followed by a four or five-character alphanumeric code which we call the “shortcode.” If a visitor recognized this whole thing as a URL, they would get access to their visit. If a visitor didn’t recognize this as a URL, they would hopefully go to our homepage and find the link that took them to the “visit shortcode page” seen below.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 4.03.33 PM copy

From here, they would enter their shortcode and get their visit. A visit page contains a grid of all the images of items you collected and created during your visit to the museum, which looked like this:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.37.47 PM

You will notice the unwieldy CTA. It’s big, it’s ugly and it gets in the way of what we’re all here to do, but this was our first opportunity to present the concept of “visit claiming” to the visitor. Visit claiming is the idea that your visit is initially anonymous, but you can create an account and claim it as your own. Let’s say the visitor engages the CTA and claims their account. They are taken through a log in / sign up flow and return to their visit page which has now been linked to their account.

After claiming a visit, the visitor has access to some new functionality. At the top of the page are the token share tools. Under every image now live privacy controls, in the form of a repeated paragraph. At the very bottom of the page are buttons to make everything public, export the visit and delete the visit.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.38.28 PM Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.38.57 PM

What to Work On?

The goal for this work was to redesign the post-visit experience to put the visitor’s experience above all of our functional and technical requirements. At this point, we were all familiar with the many complex details along the way, so we met to discuss the end-to-end experience. Taking a step back and thinking in terms of expectations — both ours and the visitors’ — helped us rebuild the experience from the ground up. Feedback we had collected both anecdotally and through our online feedback form was helpful in this process. Once we had an idea of a visitor’s overall expectations of the post-visit experience, we were able to turn that into actionable tasks.

Step 1: Redesigning Visit Retrieval

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 5.45.33 PM

The first pain point we identified was the beginning of the experience: visit retrieval. Katie, our former Labs technologist, has written before about some of the ways we’ve tried to get visitors quickly up to speed on “how everything works” — the idea that you get a pen, you use the pen to collect objects, you go to a website and you get your objects. Her work focused on informational postcards and the introductory script used by the visitor experience staff. In the case of the visit retrieval flow chart above, this helped reduce the number of “no” answers to the two questions: “do I have my ticket?” and “do I recognize the URL on my ticket?”

That second question — “do I recognize the URL on my ticket?” — is not a question we would have expected visitors to even be asking. To us, the no-vowel/non-standard-TLD “URL-shortener”-style URL, a la bit.ly or t.co, has an instantly recognizable purpose. Through visitor feedback, we learned that for some visitors, it understandably looked more like an internal tracking number than the actual website we wanted people to go visit.

For these visitors, the best-case scenario is that the they would go to our main website where we provide links, both in the header and on the homepage, to the “visit retrieval” page. Here it is again, for reference:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 4.03.33 PM copy

Since we expected users to go straight to the URL on their ticket, this page was more of a backup and as such hadn’t received a lot of attention. As a consequence of this, there were a few things that confused users on the page. First, the confirm button’s CTA is “fetch,” which is different from the “retrieve” used in the header and “access” used on the ticket. Second, the placeholder text in the input field is cut off. Third, the introduction of the word “shortcode,” which we’ve always used internally to refer to a visitor’s visit ID, had no meaning in the visitor’s mind. We tried explain it by saying that it means “the alphanumeric code after the final slash on your ticket,” which is a useless jumble of words.

Our approach to this was to eliminate the “do I recognize the URL?” question and its resulting outcomes (the dotted box in the flow chart above) and replace it with self-evident instructions. To that end, we redesigned both the visit retrieval page and the ticket itself. Here’s the new ticket:

ticket_new

We’ve provided a much more human-friendly URL in “www.cooperhewitt.org/you” and established the shortcode (now just called “code”) as a separate entity. Regardless of whether or not visitors were confused by the short URL, the language on the new ticket fits with our desire to use natural language wherever we can to avoid having the digital experience feel unnecessarily technical.

The visit retrieval page (which is accessed via the URL on the ticket) also got an update. The code entry field got much bigger and we tucked a small FAQ below it. We also standardized on the word “retrieve” as the imperative.

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Step 2: Redesigning the Visit Page

The next pain point we identified was the visit page itself, and specifically how we used it to explain claiming and privacy. Here’s the page again for reference:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.37.47 PM

The problem concerning how we explained claiming is fairly straightforward. The visual design of the CTA is obtrusive, but it was our only opportunity to explain the benefits of claiming a visit. We sought to find a less obtrusive, more intuitive way to explain why claiming a visit is an option our visitors might want to take advantage of.

The problem concerning how we explained privacy is the more complicated of the two issues. It specifically regards the concept of the “anonymous visit.” Visits aren’t connected with visitor’s identities in any way except in that only they know the code. We do this because we need a way to uniquely identify each museum visit and the shortcode keeps that unique ID at a reasonable length. We also want to allow visitors to have an anonymous post-visit experience, meaning they can see everything they did in the museum without having to sign up for an account. But we don’t expect everyone to remember their shortcode or hold on to their ticket forever, so we allow visitors to create an account on our website and “claim” their visits. A claimed visit is linked to a visitor’s email address, so now they can throw out their ticket and forget their shortcode. Over time, we also hope that visitors will claim multiple visits with their accounts so they get a complete history of their relationship with our museum.

The problem this presents is that we have to treat every visitor who has a code as if they are the owner of that visit. This manifests itself in a specific (but important) use case. If a visitor shares their visit on social media while it is unclaimed, then any person who accesses the visit will also have the option to sign up and claim it as their own.

Further compounding this issue is the fact that we automatically make claimed visits private. We do this because in claiming an account, the visitor is effectively de-anonymizing it. Claimed visits are linked to real-world identities (in the form of a username) and for that reason we make it an opt-in choice to go public with that connection.

The goal of redesigning this page, then, was to allow the visitor to navigate the complex business logic without having to fully comprehend it. In talking this through we concluded that by consolidating the visit controls (which previously only appeared on the claimed visit page) and adding them (greyed out) to the unclaimed visit we could solve many of our problems. Why have a paragraph of explanatory text about why you should claim your visit when we could just show you the control panel that claimed visits have access to? A control panel presents the functionality plainly and concisely, without confusing language.

This also allowed us to establish a language of icons that we could reuse elsewhere to replace explanatory sentences. We also agreed to standardize on the word “claim” as the action that we wanted visitors to engage in, as it more effectively conveys the idea that other people have visits as well but we need to know that this one was yours.

Best of all, it allowed us to build off the work we’d done earlier this year which had the explicit purpose of organizing our code and visual hierarchy to better support future iterations.

Here’s what that ended up looking like.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.21.16 PM

Interacting with any of the controls invokes a modal dialog that prompts the user claim their visit. If they’re not logged in, they are presented with a login / signup prompt. Otherwise they are asked to confirm their desire to claim the visit. Once claimed, the controls function as expected. Like the changes we made to the ticket design, it moves towards a more self-evident experience that requires less information processing time on the visitor’s part.

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Finally, some bonus gifs to show off the interaction details. The control panel has some rollover action:

controls

We use modal dialogs to confirm privacy changing, deleting and claiming actions:

publicification

A Brief Bit About Code

Powering the redesign was a complete overhaul of the Javascript that powers these pages. Specifically, we reorganized it to remove inline code and decouple API logic from DOM logic. In lay terms, this means separating the code that says “when I click this thing…” from the code that says “…perform this action.” When those separate intentions are tightly coupled, the website is less flexible and doing maintenance work or experimenting with alternate user flows requires more effort than necessary. When separate, it makes reusing code much more straightforward, which will allow us to tweak and test with ease going forward. Recent frameworks such as Angular or React, which we’ve only just started experimenting with, excel at this. For now, we opted for a slightly modified module pattern, which gives us just enough structure to keep things organized without having to learn a new framework.

What’s Next?

The changes have only been live for a few days now so it will take some time to build up enough numbers to see where to focus our future improvements on this part of the site. Specifically, we will be looking at the percentage of visitors who visit their website and the percentage of those visitors who create accounts, and hope to see the rate of change increasing for both of those numbers.

One part of this visitor flow where we hope to do structured A/B tests is with the “sign up” functionality. Right now, when a visitor enters their code and clicks the “Retrieve” button, they are taken immediately to their visit page. We want to test whether adding in a guided “visit claiming” flow, which would optionally hold the user’s hand through the account creation process before they’ve seen their objects, results in more account creations. We’ll wait and collect enough “A” data before rolling the “B” test out.

Of course, there are big questions we can start answering as well. How can we enhance the value of a visitor’s personal collection? Right now we have rudimentary note-taking functionality which is severely underutilized. What do we do with that? What about new features? We have all of our object metadata sitting right there waiting to be turned into personalized visualizations. (Speaking of that – we have public API methods for visit data!) Finally, how can we complete the cycle and turn the current “post-visit” into the next “pre-visit” experience?

With each iteration, we strive not only to apply what we’ve learned from visitors, colleagues and peers to our digital ecosystem, but also to improve the ease with which future iterations can be made. We are better able to answer questions both big and small with these iterations, which we hope over time will result in a stronger and more meaningful relationship between Cooper Hewitt and our visitors.

100 days

Museum Stats | Collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Today marks the 100th day since the Pen started being distributed to visitors. Its been a wild ride and the latest figures are far beyond our estimations.

As of today, Pens have been handed out to 40,846 visitors which represents about 93% of all eligible visitors so far. We’re not currently distributing Pens on Saturday nights, nor to education groups, so they’re excluded from the count.

When we were thinking about the Pen and its integration into the museum, ubiquity was a critical concern. We knew that making it an ‘addon’ or ‘optional’ wasn’t going to achieve the behavior change that we desired, so continuing to make the on-boarding process easier for visitors and staff has been very important.

All of that would be for nought, if those Pens weren’t being used. Those Pens have collected 889,156 objects – averaging nearly 22 per Pen. That’s really surprised us! With a median of 11 we are still working on new methods in the galleries to help visitors collect more with their Pens, and in some cases, get started.

We’ve been equally excited that visitors have chosen to save 35,138 of their own creations from the wallpaper room, 3D designs, and Sketchbot portraits.

We’ve seen dwell times on the campus – from the times visitors take the Pen to when they return on exit – balloon out to a current average of 102 minutes, slightly less on weekends.

Another surprise has been the ‘most collected object’. It is the Noah’s Ark cut paper from 1982, an object that is on display towards the back of Making Design on the 2nd floor – certainly not the first object a visitor encounters. We probably shouldn’t be very surprised though, as it does also show up frequently as a visitor favorite on Instagram.

If you’d like to see what else is popular then hop over to our newly public ‘basic statistics‘ page where the top six objects and other numbers update daily.

And as for the post-visit experience? Just over 25% of ticketed visitors check out their collections after their visit, and a third of them decide to create accounts to permanently store their collection.

Over the coming months we’ll be working on continuously improving the Pen experience in the galleries – and as next week’s new exhibitions open to the public, the museum will have changed over almost every gallery since December. A lot of those improvements are going to be, as we’ve already seen, not technical in nature, but about more human-to-human interaction and assistance.

The digital experience at Cooper Hewitt is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Object concordances – what is the simplest thing to match like with like?

eames-concordances-full

Do you notice anything special about this screenshot of Charles Eames’ famous No. 670 Chair?

It might be hard to see because it’s a tall screenshot and this is a small thumbnail. Have a look at the large version. Hint: It’s not the part where the chair is missing in the picture. It’s actually this, on the right-hand side of the object details:

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Object concordances! With other museums! To the same objects in their collections!! On their own websites !!!

Before you get too excited (and think its actual working ‘Linked Data’), we should point out that as of this writing we have only “concordified” four distinct objects – this one, this one, this one and that one – eight times with four separate organizations, one of which is our own shop, so there is a lot of work left to do.

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If you look carefully you can see that most of the concordances, to date, were added within about 90 minutes of one another. That’s because Seb and I were talking about object concordances over lunch that day and agreed that we could probably push the simplest and dumbest thing out the door before I went home. It has been something that has been on the agenda since mid-2012.

Specifically, we maintain a fixed list of institutions with whom we will “concordify” objects. If your institution isn’t on that list yet it’s not personal. We can add as many institutions as we want but we think the narrow focus helps to explain the purpose of the tool. Then we simply record that institutions unique ID, the object ID for something in our collection and the object ID for something in their collection. That’s it.

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Currently the tools for adding concordances, or editing institutions, are … terrible.

(Or rather, they are the unadorned plumbing that makes the whole thing work. So they are beautiful and elegant in their own way but most people would be forgiven for not seeing those qualities right away.)

Short-term the goal is to build some friendlier “admin” web page for a few more people to add concordances without having to worry about the technical details. Medium-term the goal is to create restricted API methods for doing fancy-pants buttons and pop-up dialogs on the object pages themselves to allow staff to add concordances as they think of them or are otherwise just poking around the collections website. Maybe in the long term, ‘the crowd’ might be invited to do it too.

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Somewhere between those two things we will also build proper “index” pages on the collections website of all the objects that have been concordified, all the institutions that have concordified objects and so on. Just like we’ve already done for people.

The other thing we’ll do shortly is make sure that these concordances are included in the CC0 Cooper Hewitt collections metadata dump which is available on GitHub.

When we said “the simplest thing” we meant it.

There isn’t much yet but it’s a start – a tangible proof of what it could be – and if we’ve done our job right then it is one of those things that will grow exponentially, as always, as time and circumstance permit.

(If you’ve been a long time reader you might remember we did Rijkscolors back in 2013 as an experiment in automatically matching objects – but we were undone by language and structural differences in metadata, and the reality that humans might still be better at this at least until the sector irons a few things out)

Collect all the things – shoeboxes, shop items and the Pen

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You can now collect any object in the collection, or on display, from the collections website itself. Just like in the galleries there is a small “collect” icon on the top right-hand side of every object page on the collections website. It’s not just individual object pages but also all the object list pages, too. So many “collect” icons!

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  Objects that haven’t been collected yet have a grey icon.

  Objects that have been collected in the galleries, as part of a visit to the museum, have a pink icon.

  Objects that that have been collected on the collections website have an orange icon.

Simply click the grey icon to collect an object or click one of the orange or pink icons to remove or un-collect that object.

That’s it!

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Just like visit items, things you collect on the website have a permanent URL that can be made public to share with other people and can be given a bespoke title or description. Objects that you collect on the collections website live in something we’re calling the “shoebox”.

You can get your to shoebox by visiting https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/users/YOUR-USERNAME/shoebox or if you’re already logged in to your Cooper Hewitt account by visiting https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/you/shoebox/.

There is also a handy link in the Your stuff menu, located at the top-left of every page on the collections website.

The shoebox is the set of all the objects you’ve collected (or created) on the website or during your visits to the museum. Although visits and visit items overlap with things in your shoebox we still treat them differently because although you need to be logged in to you Cooper Hewitt account to add things to your shoebox a visit to the museum can be entirely anonymous if a visitor so chooses.

The default view for the shoebox is to display everything together in reverse-chronological order but you can filter the view to show only things collected online or things collected during a visit. You can also see the set of all the objects you’ve made public or private.

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logged out view (large version)

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logged in view (large version)

But it’s not just objects, either. You can already collect videos during your museum visit so those are included too. Ultimately the only limit to what you might collect with the Pen is time-and-typing. Things we’re thinking about making collect-able include: entire exhibitions or the introductory texts on the wall for an exhibition or people or individual rooms in the Mansion.

Museum retail

We’ve started this process by allowing you to collect things in the museum Shop.

By “things in the Shop” we mean all the things that have ever been sold in the Shop over the years. And by “all the things” we mean almost all the things. There is some technical hoop-jumping related to inventory management systems and that is why we don’t have everything yet but we’ll get there in time.

We are a captial-D design museum with a capital-D design shop and many of the things that have been available in the Shop have gone on to become part of our permanent collection so it only makes sense to give them a home on the collections website. In fact MoMA already does similarly with their “find related products in the MoMA Store” feature though ours is a bit different.

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You can see for yourself at https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/shop

The /shop section is divided in two parts: Brands and Items (and all the items for a given brand of course). There isn’t a whole lot of extra information beyond titles and links to the SHOP Cooper Hewitt website for those items that are currently in-stock but it’s a start. Like the rest of the collections website we’ve started with the idea that providing permanent stable URLs that people can have confidence we create something that can be improved on over time.

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Shop items and brands don’t get updated as regularly as we’d like yet. We are still working through the fiddly details of bridging our systems with the Shop’s ecommerce and POS system and some things still need to be done by hand. We’ve been able to get this far though so we expect things will only get better.

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You might be wondering…

You might be reading this and starting to wonder Hmmm… does that mean I can also collect things in the Shop as I walk around the museum with the Pen? the answer is… Yes!

As of this writing there are only one or two items that can be collected with the Pen because the Shop staff are still getting familiar with the tools and thinking about how making collect-able labels changes in their day-to-day workflow. The obvious future of this might be the infamous ‘wedding register’, however we believe that many museum visitors actually would like to bookmark objects to possibly buy later, or just remember as part of their overall visit to the ‘museum campus’.

Practically what that has meant are some changes to Sam‘s “tag writer” application (the subject of a future blog post) to fetch shop items via our API and then letting the Shop folks decide what they want to tag and when they want to do it.

There has been a whole lot of change here over the course of the last three years and allowing the various parts of the museum warm up to the possibilities that the Pen starts to afford at their own pace and with not only a minimum of fuss but plenty of wiggle-room for experimentation is really important.

In the meantime we hope that you enjoy collecting at least more, if not all, of the things that make up the museum.

Exporting your visits

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Starting today you can export the items you have collected or created during your visits to the museum. When you export a visit we will bundle up all the objects you’ve collected and all the items you’ve created in to a static website that is then compressed and made available for you to download directly.

A static website means that you can view all of your visit items in any old web browser, even when it’s not connected to the Internet. It means that if you have your own website you can copy your visit export over it and host it and share it and, well… do whatever you want with it.

Where “whatever you want” means “so long as you comply” with the Smithsonian Terms of Use or assert your rights under Fair Use if you are based in the US.

We think that this is of particular importance to educators who may not have unfiltered or functional internet connections in their classrooms.

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A visit export doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles that your visit on the Cooper Hewitt collections website does but everything you need to view an export (except a web browser obviously) is contained in the file you download. There is a landing page, and a paginated view of everything you’ve done and a page for every object collected and each one of your creations.

Visit exports also come with a friendly and detailed JSON file for every item you’ve collected or created. If you don’t know what that last sentence means, don’t worry about it. It just means that everything you’ve done during a visit also has a file containing structured metadata about that activity which your developer friends may get excited about.

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Visit exports use are very own js-cooperhewitt-images library to manage square-cropped thumbnails that reveal the complete thumbnail when you mouse over them, just like on the collections website.

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Images for loan objects are not included with your visit download. That’s because they’re loan objects and we only have permission to host those images from our own collections website. Instead of including the images locally in your visit download every time there is a loan object we link directly to the image hosted on our own website.

If you’re not online (or your web browser hasn’t already cached a copy of the image on your hard drive) then your visit pages are smart enough to load a placeholder image for that object. Like this:

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We do the same for individual item pages too:

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online
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offline

Visit exports are deliberately minimal, by design. They contain a small amount of HTML markup that’s been enhanced with a little bit of JavaScript and CSS to create a minimally elegant export that people can easily tailor to their own needs. Some people may quibble with the idea that including both the jQuery and Bootstrap libraries is not really a “little bit of JavaScript and CSS” but we hope that we have done things in such a way that it’s easy for people to change if they choose to.

Visit exports are currently only available for visits that have been “paired” with your Cooper Hewitt account. A visit that has been exported is cached on our servers but it can be regenerated when something about your visit changes – you delete an item, or add a note and so on – not more than once per day. Each one of your visits (remember: each one of your paired visits) has a handy export button at the bottom of each page and you can see a list of all your exported/exportable visits by going to: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/you/visits/exports/

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The exports themselves are generated using our own API and the recently released cooperhewitt.visit and cooperhewitt.visit.items family of methods. There is a bunch of bespoke code that we’ve written to manage how exports are scheduled and stored but the part that actually builds your export is a plain-vanilla API application using the same public API methods that you might use to generate your own visit export.

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In time we may open source the API application we’ve written but for now we’re going to keep putting it through its paces to make sure that it works consistently, as expected, and to force ourselves to use the same tools we’re making available to people outside the “hula hoop“.

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Finally, a little bit of administrivia: Your visit exports are made available under the Smithsonian Terms of Use agreement. You can read the entire document but the short (and relevant) bits are:

The Smithsonian Institution (the “Smithsonian”) provides the content on this website (www.si.edu), other Smithsonian websites, and third- party sites on which it maintains a presence (“SI Websites”) in support of its mission for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The Smithsonian invites you to use its online content for personal, educational and other non-commercial purposes; this means that you are welcome you to make fair use of the Content as defined by copyright law. Information on United States copyright fair use law is available from the United States Copyright Office. Please note that you are responsible for determining whether your use is fair and for responding to any claims that may arise from your use.

In addition, the Smithsonian allows personal, educational, and other non-commercial uses of the Content on the following terms:

You must cite the author and source of the Content as you would material from any printed work.

You must also cite and link to, when possible, the SI Website as the source of the Content.

You may not remove any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices including attribution information, credits, and notices, that are placed in or near the text, images, or data.

In addition to copyright, you must comply with all other terms or restrictions (such as trademark, publicity and privacy rights, or contractual restrictions) as may be specified in the metadata or as may otherwise apply to the Content. Please note that you are responsible for making sure that your use does not violate or infringe upon the rights of anyone else.

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Enjoy!

From concept to video prototype: the early form of the Pen

It was in late 2012 that the concept for the Pen was pitched to the museum by Local Projects, working then as subcontractors to Diller Scofidio & Renfro. The concept portrayed the Pen as an alternative to a mobile experience, and importantly, was symbol that was meant to activate visitors.

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Original concept for the Pen by Local Projects with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, late 2012.

“Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures.” (Julian Bleeker, 2009)

In late 2013, Hanne Delodder and our media technologist, Katie Shelly, were tasked with making a short instructional video – a piece of ‘internal design fiction’ to help us expand the context of the Pen, beyond just the technology. (Hanne was spending three weeks observing work in the Labs courtesy of the Belgian Government as part of her professional development at Het Huis van Alijn, a history museum in Ghent.)

The video used the vWand from Sistelnetworks, an existing product that became the starting point from which the final Pen developed. At the time of production the museum had not yet begun the final development path that engaged Sistelnetworks, GE, Makesimply, Tellart and Undercurrent who would help augment and transform the vWand into the new product we now have.

The brief for the video was simply to create an instructional video of the kind that the museum might play in the Great Hall and on our website to instruct visitors how they might use the Pen. As it turned out, the video ended up being a hugely valuable tool in the ‘socialisation’ of the Pen as the entirety of the museum started to gets its head around what/how/when from curators to security staff, well before we had any working prototypes.

It ended up informing our design sprints with GE and Sistelnetworks which resulted in the form, operation and interaction design for the Pen; as well as a ‘stewardship’ sprint with SVA’s Products of Design where we worked through operational issues around distribution and return.

The video was also the starting point for the instructional video we ended up having produced that now plays online and in the Great Hall. You will notice that the emphasis in the final video has changed dramatically – focussing on collecting inside the museum and the importance of the visitor’s ticket (in contrast to the public collection of email addresses in the original).

The digital experience at Cooper Hewitt is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.