It’s Thursday night, 8pm, and our leaders Lillian and Nancy are coming into our studio to get a first impression of what we plan to present the next day. The revelation: It takes a big focus on user experience and visitors’ flow to make people understand a prototypical exhibition:
- Most likely it makes sense to do a presentation BEFORE you have people visit your prototype. Otherwise you risk that people won’t be able to fill in the missing parts and will have a hard time imagining what you were going for (unless the prototype is very advanced). As a result we prepared our slide deck in a way that did not only present our conceptual approach, but also provided an overview of our exhibition in form of a floor plan.
- If you want people to stand in a certain spot (which, for example, is required for our media wall) you need to mark this spot very explicitly, e.g. with footsteps on the floor.
- If you have repeating elements, but only one example fully developed (e.g. like our media wall), make sure that visitors understand that what they see is just one sample.
- If you want people to have a honest and personal conversation (e.g. like in our private conversation booths), don’t tell them in a stilted and impersonal voice, “that this is a candid conversion and that you can ask any question you want to”. Make it sound more personal and private, then people will assume that the conversation will be private and candid …