We (Alex – volunteer co-ordinator  and Fay – User researcher) spent a lovely half an hour wandering round the museum with the app, discovering some things that we hadn’t discovered before – we thought it was very fun and simple to use.

We got a little confused at first as it asked how many players there were and took our ages – we thought this meant we might be playing against each other (and got ready for a bit of competition!). The only game that did ask us to play together was in the geology gallery, where it asked us to find something broken. We were a bit confused by this, what with it mostly being natural objects like rocks and fossils. We later realised that there was a broken bone that we could have chosen but this did require some creative thinking! We also weren’t too sure what the numbers next to the game themes were – were these our scores? We worked out they were the amount of games that we had completed. Should they be reset each time someone new starts playing?

At one point we were sent along to the Curiosity gallery, where we were asked to find an object – a broken pot – which we couldn’t find anywhere! Turns out it was in the under 7s area (where you have to take your shoes off). We wondered why it might take us into there being two adults… By this point we’d run out of time and the app assumed we had found it. At the end of the countdown there was nowhere to say that we hadn’t found the object and I ended up having to take a picture of something random to move it along.

We really loved the things we unlocked for completing challenges, but they didn’t seem to be relevant to the areas that we were in. The first one we did gave us some lovely info about the RWA after we’d taken a picture of the ichthyosaur, and one in the geology gallery told us about objects we assumed must be in the Egypt gallery – we thought it might be nice to have been given snippets of info about objects in the galleries we were in, so we could go and have a look straight away before moving on to the next game.

We really enjoyed moving round the museum with the map and loved how it alerted you about where you were – that worked really well.

Supporting evidence for milestone 4.2 – informal user testing