Tag Archives: visitor experience

Interactive timeline design: seeking feedback!

Guest post by Olivia Vane

I’ve been visiting Cooper Hewitt for the last few months designing a new way of exploring the collection using timelines and tags. (For more background and details of the project, I’ve written a post here).

I’m set up with a prototype on a touchscreen in the Cooper Hewitt galleries today seeking impressions and feedback from visitors. Do drop in and have a play! I would love to hear your thoughts.

 

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

First, let me begin this post with a hearty “hello”! This is my first Labs blog post, though I’ve been on board with the Digital and Emerging Media team since July 2015 as Media Technologist. Day-to-day I participate in much of the Labs activity that you’ve read about here: maintaining and improving our website; looking for ways to enhance visitor experience; and expanding the meaningful implementation of technology at Cooper Hewitt. In this post I will focus on the slice of my work that pertains to video content and exhibitions.

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

The topic of exhibition video is fresh in my mind since we are just off the installation of Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. This is a multi-floor exhibit that contains twenty-one videos hand-picked or commissioned by the exhibition curators. My part in the exhibition workflow is to format, brand, caption and quality-check videos, ushering them through a production flow that results in their display in the galleries and distribution online. Along with the rest of the Labs team, I also advise on the presentation and installation of videos and interactive experiences in exhibitions and on the web, and help steer the integration of Pen functionality with exhibition content. This post gathers some of my video-minded observations collected on the road to installing Beauty.

The Beauty curators and the Labs team came together when content for the show began to arrive—both loans of physical objects and digital file transfers. At this time, my video workflow shifted into high gear, and I began to really see the landscape of digital content planned for the exhibit. Videos in Beauty fall into roughly two categories: those that are the primary highlighted object on display and those that supplement the display of another object. Sam Brenner recently posted about reformatting our web presentation of video content when it stands in as primary collection object and has a medium that is “video, animation or other[wise] screen-based.” This change was a result of thinking through the flag we raised earlier for the curators around linking collection records to tags, i.e. “what visitors get when they collect works with the Pen.” As has been mentioned before on this blog, the relationship of collecting points (NFC tags) to collection objects does not need to be one-to-one; Beauty expanded our exploration of the tags-to-collection records relationship in a few interesting ways.

Collecting Neri Oxmann

When visitors collect at the Neri Oxman tag they save a cluster of collections database records, including 12 glass vessels and a video.

In the Beauty exhibition, collecting points are presented uniformly: one tag in each object label. Additionally, tags positioned beside wall text panels allow visitors to save chunks of written exhibition content. The curatorial format of the Triennial exhibition organized around designers (sometimes with multiple works on display), however, encouraged us to think carefully about the tag-collecting relationship. I was impressed to see the curators curating the Pen experience, including notes to me along with each video, like “the works in the show are jewelry pieces; the video will supplement,” “video is primary object; digital prints supplement,” and “video clips sequenced together for display but each video is separately collectible.” They were really thinking about the user flow of the Pen and the post-visit experience, extending their role in organizing and presenting information to all aspects of the museum experience.

Another first in the Beauty exhibition is the video content created specifically for interactive tables. With the curators’ encouragement, the designers featured in the exhibition considered the tables as a unique environment to present bonus content. For example, Olivier van Herpt provided a video of his 3D printer at work on the ceramic vessels on display in the exhibition. It was interesting to see the possibilities that the tables and post-visit outlets opened up—for one thing, the quality standards can be more relaxed for videos shown outside the monitors in the galleries. Also notable is the fact that the Beauty curators selected behind-the-scenes-type videos for tables and post-visit, suggesting that these outlets make room for content that might not typically make it onto gallery walls.

Still from Oliver van Herpt's "3D Printed Ceramic Process"

The video “3D Printed Ceramic Process” by Oliver van Herpt is an example of behind-the-scenes video content that was made for tables and website display only.

The practical fallout on my end was that these supplemental videos added to the already video-heavy exhibition, putting increased pressure on the video workflow. In turn, this revealed a major lack of optimization. The diagram of my video workflow shows, for example, several repeated instances of formatting, captioning and exporting. Multiplied by twenty-one, each of these redundant procedures takes up significant time. Application of branding is probably the biggest time-hog in the workflow—all of it is done manually and locking in the information of maker, credit line and video title with curators and designers is a substantial task. It’s funny, the amount of video content is increasing in exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt and it’s receiving increased attention from curators, but the supplementary videos in the galleries are not treated as first-order exhibition objects, so they don’t go through as rigorous a documentation process as other works in the show. Because of this, video-specific information required for my workflow remained in flux until the very last minute. Even the video content itself continued to shift as designers pushed past my deadlines to request more time to make changes and additions. In truth, the deadlines related to in-gallery video content are much stricter than those for table/post-visit-only content because gallery videos require hardware installation. The environment of the tables and website afford continual change, but deadlines act as benchmarks to keep those interfaces stocked with new content that stays in sync with objects in the physical exhibition.

Exhibition Video Workflow

The workflow that videos follow to get to gallery screens, interactive tables and the collections website.

I maintain a spreadsheet to collect video information and maintain order over my exhibitions video workflow. These are the column headings.

All the steps and data points that need to be checked-off in my exhibition video workflow.

By the exhibition opening, I had all video information confirmed, and all branding and formatting completed. The running spreadsheet I keep as a video to-do list was filled with check-marks and green (good-to-go) highlighting. I had created media records in TMS and connected them to exhibition videos uploaded to YouTube; this allows a script to pull in the embed code so videos appear within the YouTube player on the collections site. I also linked the media records to other database entries so that they would show up on the collections site in relation to other objects and people. For example, since I linked the “Afreaks Process” video record to all of the records for the beaded Afreak objects, the video appears on each object page, like the one for The Haas Brothers and Haas Sisters’ “Evelyn”. Related videos like this one (that are not the primary object) are configured to appear at the bottom of an object page with the language, “We have 1 video that features Sculpture, Evelyn, from the Afreaks series, 2015.” Since the video has its own record in the database, there is also a corresponding “video page” for the same clip that presents the video at the top with related objects in a grid view below. I also connected object records to database entries for people, ensuring that visitors who click on a name find videos among the list of associated objects.

Screenshot of Haas Brothers record webpage

The webpage for the Haas Brothers record includes a video among the related objects.

It is highly gratifying to seed videos into this web of database connections. The content is so rich and so interesting that it really enhances the texture of the collections site and of exhibitions. Cooper Hewitt curators demonstrated their appreciation for the value of video by honoring video works as primary objects on display. They also utilized video in a demonstrative way to enhance the presentation of highlighted works. Beauty opened the doors for curating video works on interactive tables, and grouping videos in with clusters of data linked to collecting points (aka. tags). I’m pleased with the overall highly integrated and considered take on video content in the latest exhibition, and I hope we can push the integration even further as the curators become increasingly invested in adapting their practice to the extended exhibition platforms we have in place like tables, tags and web.

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.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.17.46 PM

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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.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.21.44 PM

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.

Upending ticketing

One of the opportunities we have right now is to challenge the conventional wisdom that back-of-house systems need to always be ‘enterprise grade’. As we are currently in renovation mode and our exhibitions and programs are happening offsite and around the city, we have the chance to rethink and experiment with different systems to perform common functions such as ticketing. In so doing we are looking at the way different systems shape visitor/staff interactions and are also able to refocus by choosing systems on their user experience rather than their ‘backwards compatibility’.

A recent change we’ve made is to use EventBrite for ticketing, replacing a system that despite being tightly integrated with our donor management system placed an inscrutable purchasing interface between the customer and their desired tickets. It isn’t a permanent solution (what is these days?), but more the opening of a ‘possibility space’.

So how is it going?

Our ticket selling velocity has increased – events sell more quickly – and we’ve been able to integrate ticket selling directly into our email marketing, as well. When ticket price points have reached capacity we’ve used automatic waitlisting and we’ve even been able to collect donations as purchasers buy tickets, and we’ve also been able to issue refunds easily when required. Most importantly the customer experience of purchasing tickets has vastly improved.

Last night, we had our first trial of a medium size event check-in. Using the EventBrite iPhone Check-In App we were able to run a cashless door using staff members’ iPhones to check everyone in quickly. Checkins were done via ticket scans and where people had forgotten their printed ticket, by name. Each iPhone synced to the master list meaning that we could easily ‘add extra ticket staff’ to process more people if we had a logjam. This had a nice side effect of freeing up staff time to direct visitors to our roving iPads for quick signup to our mailing list on their way into the venue.

But the purpose of deploying lightweight technologies as a replacement for gargantuan enterprise systems is not just about improving visitor experience, or streamlining back-of-house operations – it is also about positioning us to reconceptualise the type of entry/ticketing experience we might want for our new building and galleries when they are completed.

If it is possible to do the entry experience to events in a seamless mannner with only mobile devices, can a museum jettison its ticket counter in a redesign? It also makes us ask ourselves to be specific about the other functions ticket counters might serve.