I ended the Spring term at a sort of cross roads. I hadn’t made nearly enough progress on my thesis to feel confident in the direction of the project and was unsure about how interesting / coherent it would be to others after the user testing.

My intent is to create a method of exploring a museum exhibition in a non-linear and copresent way. The usual method for museum tours is an audio guide that is linear. Exhibitions also feature a lot more artwork than a person can typically absorb in one visit, so what if an exhibition could be visited multiple times in more manageable way?

The experience I landed on was a bifurcating decision tree where a user would always only have two things to choose from. The decision tree would mean that most people would experience the tour differently. Another feature would be that you could invite someone via text to take the tour with you, and you would proceed to the next step only after you had both made a choice, kind of like a chess game, so the speed of the tour could vary widely as well.

The state of the project at the end of the Spring term can be found here: https://www.figma.com/file/HLkJvVNuM0GsjhDnuORexV/HC-Tours

After the first class I spent sometime programming the first steps, my goal for each week looks like this:

Week 2: June 10 – Have initial demo of interactions, integrate analytics, user test

Week 3: June 17 – Add structured content, first attempt at a tour, structure analytics, user test

Week 4: June 24 – Polish interactions and copresence, host and share, user test

Week 5: July 1 – Have multiple tours, report/visualize analytics

Some KPIs I’ve been trying to define are:

  • Users choose a diverse set of paths
  • Easily shareable
  • Most people make it through onboarding and complete a tour
  • A large enough % of people do more than one tour
  • Easily explained
  • People see a use for it beyond the tour they take

Some indicators of failure might be:

  • Prototype is not complete
  • It is not compelling / most people don’t finish a tour
  • It does not use enough of what I’ve learned in the IMA program
  • It is not technically interesting