All posts by Fay Curtis

Digital interpretation in our galleries: Discovery kick-off

Digital media, Gallery Technology, User research

Our temporary exhibitions have around a 20% conversion rate on average. While we feel this is good (temporary exhibitions are either paid entry or ‘pay what you think’, bringing in much-needed income), flip that around and it means that around 80% of people are visiting what we call our ‘permanent galleries’ – spaces that change much less often than exhibitions. With a million visitors every year across all of our sites (but concentrated at M Shed and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), that’s a lot of people.

A lot of our time as a digital team is taken up with temporary exhibitions at M Shed and Bristol Museum. Especially so for Zahid, our Content Designer, who looks after all of our AV and whose time is taken up with installs, derigs and AV support.

But what about all of the digital interpretation in our permanent galleries? Focusing on the two main museums mentioned above, we’ve got a wide range of interp such as info screens, QR codes triggering content, audio guides and kiosks. A lot of this is legacy stuff which we don’t actively update, either in terms of content or software/hardware. Other bits are newer – things we’ve been testing out or one-off installs.

So, how do we know what’s working? How do we know what we should be replacing digital interp with when it’s come to the end of its life – *IF* we should replace it at all? How do we know where we should focus our limited time (and money) for optimal visitor experience?

We’ve just started some discovery phases to collate all of our evidence and to gather more. We want a bigger picture of what’s successful and what isn’t. We need to be clear on how we can be as accessible as possible. We want to know what tech is worth investing in (in terms of money and time) and what isn’t. This is an important phase of work for us which will inform how we do digital interpretation in the future – backed up by user research.

Discovery phases

We’ve set out a number of six week stints from August 2018 to January 2019 to gather data, starting with an audit of what we have, analytics and what evidence or data we collect.

We’ll then move onto looking at specific galleries– the Egypt Gallery at Bristol Museum and most of the galleries at M Shed which have a lot of kiosks with legacy content.  (The M Shed kiosks probably need a separate post in themselves. They were installed for when the museum opened in 2011, and since then technology and user behaviours have changed drastically. There’s a lot we could reflect on around design intentions vs reality vs content…)

We’ll also be gathering evidence on any audio content across all of our sites, looking at using our exhibitions online as interp within galleries and working on the Smartify app as part of the 5G testing at M Shed.

We’re using this trello board to manage the project, if you want to follow what we’re doing.

Auditing our digital interpretation

First off, we simply needed to know what we have in the galleries. Our apprentice Rowan kindly went around and scoured the galleries, listing every single thing she could find – from QR codes to interactive games.

We then categorised everything, coming up with the below categories. This has really helped to give an overview of what we’re working with.

Key Level of interaction Examples User control
1 Passive Auto play / looping video, static digital label, info screens User has no control
2 Initiate QR code / URL to extra content, audio guide User triggers content, mostly on own or separate device
3 Active Games and puzzles, timeline User has complete control. Device in gallery

We then went through and listed what analytics we currently gather for each item or what action we need to take to set them up. Some things, such as info screens are ‘passive’ so we wouldn’t gather usage data for. Other things such as games built with Flash and DiscoveryPENs (accessible devices for audio tours), don’t have in-built analytics so we’ll need to ask our front of house teams to gather evidence and feedback from users. We’ll also be doing a load of observations in the galleries.

Now that people have devices in their pockets more powerful than a lot of the legacy digital interpretation in our galleries, should we be moving towards a focus on creating content for use on ‘BYO devices’ instead of installing tech on-site which will inevitably be out of date in a few short years? Is this a more accessible way of doing digital interpretation?

Let us know what you think or if you have any evidence you’re happy to share with us. I’d be really interested to hear back from museums (or any visitor attractions really) of varying sizes. We’ll keep you updated with what we find out.

Fay Curtis – User Researcher

Zahid Jaffer – Content Designer

Mark Pajak – Head of Digital

QR codes and triggered content in museum spaces – in 2018

Gallery Technology, User research

Any other museum digital people getting an influx of requests for QR codes to put in galleries recently? No? IS IT JUST US?!

After thinking that QR codes had died a death a few years ago, over the last few months we’ve had people from lots of different teams ask for QR codes to trigger content in galleries, for a variety of uses such as:

  • Sending people to additional content to what’s in an exhibition, to be used while in the gallery e.g. an audio guide
  • Showing the same content that’s in the exhibition but ‘just in case’ people want to look at it on their phones
  • Sending people to content that is referenced in exhibitions/galleries that needs a screen but doesn’t have an interactive e.g. a map on Know Your Place

After an attempt to fend them off we realised that we didn’t really have any evidence that people don’t use them. At least nothing recent or since the introduction of automatic QR code scanning with iOS 11 last year (thanks for that, Apple). So, we thought we’d test it out, making sure we’re tracking everything and also always providing a short URL for people to type into browsers as an alternative.

In most cases, it’s as expected and people just aren’t using them. They’re also not using the URL alternatives either, though, which maybe suggests that people don’t really want to have to go on their phones to look at content and are happy with reading the interpretation in the gallery. Controversial, I know. (Or maybe we need to provide more appealing content.)

However, then we come to our recent Grayson Perry exhibition at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, which had audio content which was ‘extra’ to what was in the exhibition. We provided headphones but visitors used their own devices. A key difference with this one though was that our front of house team facilitated use of the QR codes, encouraging visitors to use them and showing them what to do. As such, the six audio files (there was one with each tapestry on display) had 5,520 listens altogether over the course of the exhibition (March – June), over 900 each on average.

Whilst it’s great that they were used – it threw us a bit – the flip side of this is that it was only in an instance where it’s being facilitated. I’m not partuclarly keen on using something that we’re having to teach visitors how to use and where we’re trying to change users’ behaviours.

There’s also some more here around the crossover between online and gallery content (should we be using one thing for both, are they different user cases that need to be separate) which we’re talking about and testing more and more at the moment, but that’s one for another post.

We’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on triggered content. Do people even know what QR codes are? Are ‘just because we can and they’re no/low cost’ reasons enough to use them? How do you do triggered content? Is this unique to medium-sized museums or are the big and smaller guys grappling with this too? Or is it really just us?!

Exhibitions online

User Research

We recently (softly softly) went live with Exhibitions Online.

A place to translate our in-house exhibitions for an online audience, we worked with Mike and Luke at Thirty8 Digital to create a narrative structure with scroll-through content and click-through chapters on WordPress. They built in lovely features such as object grids, timelines, slideshows, maps and quotes.

There are a few exhibitions already up, past (death: the human experience) present (Empire through the Lens) and future (What is Bristol Music?). We’ve most recently used it for our European Old Masters gallery to showcase a beautiful painting we have on loan for two years: St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child by Dieric Bouts (I discovered the Pantone app with this one, taking the red from the gallery to use online. V satisfying). I’m currently working with the exhibition team to get our Pliosaurus! exhibition up – watch this space for some fun things with that one, which we’re hoping to use for interp in our Sea Dragons gallery at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery too.

(For the What is Bristol Music? exhibition opening in May 2018, we’re using WP plugin Gravity Forms to collate peoples’ experiences and pictures of the Bristol music scene to be featured in the physical exhibition. Chip in if you have a story to tell.)

So far, we’ve found the content and arrangement really depends on the exhibition. The idea isn’t to simply put the physical exhibition online (I say ‘simply’, as if it would be) but instead to use the format and content of the exhibition to engage with people in a different environment: albeit one where we’re competing with a thousand other things for people’s attention. Exhibitions which have been and gone have been slightly more challenging, as the content was never intended for this use and has needed some wrangling. The more we use it though the smoother the process is getting, now that we know what we need and it being on teams’ plans as something to consider.

We’re still in the early stages of reviewing analytics to see how people are using it. Initial results are heartening, though, with a few thousand visits having had minimal promotion. At the moment most people are finding it from our what’s on pages (where most of our traffic to the main website is anyway) and we’re thinking about what campaigns we can do to get it out there more.

Any feedback or thoughts, hmu → fay.curtis@bristol.gov.uk

A week in the Bristol Museums digital team

Digital skills, Websites, ,

rachel-and-darrenHello! My name’s Rachel and I’m a Heritage Lottery Fund Skills for the Future graduate trainee. I am usually based in Worcester as part of the Worcestershire’s Treasures project, with my traineeship focused on audience development and events. As part of the traineeship I’m able to do a week’s secondary placement at another museum or heritage venue, and this week I joined the Bristol Museums digital team to get an insight into what they do, and generally learn some new stuff. I got in touch with Zak and Fay as I knew I wanted to spend my week elsewhere learning more about museums and digital. I had seen both of them speak at conferences – Zak at the Museums Association’s annual conference in Cardiff, and Fay at Culture 24’s Digital Change: Seizing The Opportunity Online in Birmingham – and thought Bristol seemed like the place to be for museums and digital!

I’ve been involved with some really interesting and useful things since the start of the week. On Monday I did some content management on the development site in preparation for user testing later on in the week. On Tuesday I sat in on a meeting with fffunction, and then joined the museum’s new digital marketing intern, Olivia, in creating some content for social media. As the Shaun the Sheep trail started this week, we had fun coming up with some awful sheep-related puns – keep an eye out for these on @bristolmuseum! pirate_shaunOn Wednesday I visited The Georgian House Museum and The Red Lodge Museum, conducted some visitor surveys down at M Shed, and then yesterday I sat in on some user testing sessions with teachers, for the new learning pages of the website. They were given a number of scenarios to work through and it was really fascinating to see how users interact with the site and the different ways people navigate through it.

Some of the other useful things I’ve been introduced to this week are the organisation’s Audience Development Strategic Plan and their social media guidelines, and how data collected from users is collated and reported.  I also sat in on a meeting with some of the team involved with the upcoming exhibition death: the human experience to discuss the digital engagement to go alongside the physical exhibition and programme. This is just one example of the collaborative nature of the digital offer, and it came across to me that it is viewed as an integrative part of the exhibition, as opposed to just an add-on, which is really positive.

It’s also been great seeing how a different museum works. The museum I work at is quite different, in terms of size, staffing, collection and audience, and so coming to a large local authority museums service with seven physical sites has been a valuable experience in itself.

Overall I have had a brilliant week, I think it’s been a good overview of the team’s work, with lots of variety and things to get involved with. I have felt really welcome and included, and everyone at the museum has been so friendly. Thanks so much to the team for hosting me this week, and especially to Fay for letting me follow her round for most of it. My traineeship comes to an end shortly, so hopefully you’ll see me on a digital team soon!

bristolmuseums.org.uk – phase two, milestone three

Websites, ,

m_shed_venue_hireWe haven’t done an update on website phase two in a while, mainly because we’ve been busy bees behind the scenes with testing and implementing lots of new stuff.

We’re now in the midst of milestone three, having done some work on improvements in milestone one and having held our milestone two workshops a little while back. We recently went live with some fresh new venue hire sections: http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/venue-hire/

After workshops and testing we decided to go down the route of event types for venue hire – we have lots of interesting conferences at M Shed, really exciting evening events at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and lovely weddings at Blaise Castle House Museum so can adapt these depending on what people need and what our offer is. People can find information on room spaces such as capacities, download our menus and contact us to book really easily.

Know anyone who wants to hire a pretty special venue in Bristol? Send ‘em our way!

event_espresso_whats_on_190615Right now we’re in the middle of developing our ticketing functionality, which we’ll be using for our what’s on events (to replace third party sites such as eventbrite) and eventually for learning workshops. For this we’re using WordPress plugin Event Espresso; we’ve been really impressed with how this works and we’re pretty confident it’ll make the user experience so much nicer for people wanting to book with us. There’s a lot of work for us to do on fulfilment (we need to decide what to put on confirmation emails and tickets), setting up a new database and making sure people can navigate through registration easily.

Next up is user testing with teachers and learning people which will be at the beginning of July. We need to cover a number of things for learning: showing our offer (school workshops, gallery visits, teacher training etc), giving users the right information to be able to plan their visit (such as risk assessments) and then being able to book and take payments, so we’ll be testing all of this.

learning workshopsWe’re aiming for learning sections to be in place before the new school year and what’s on updates to be in place before our next What’s On guide comes out in September.

bristolmuseums.org.uk – phase two, milestone two

User Research, Websites, ,

Well it seems it’s March already. This means we’re now two milestones into project website phase two.

We’ve done a chunk of work on events filtering, which you can try out here: http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/ Hopefully you’ll agree it’s pretty simple and useful. Of course we did a spot of user testing for it and got lots of positive noises from people – let us know what you think of it.

broWe also worked a bit on improving how our opening times are displayed. We added the option to add ‘notes’ to particular days, which is mainly for Bristol Record Office who have a range of opening times across any given week or month. We’re really trying to make it as clear as possible when our sites are open (and of course each of the six sites have different opening times across different seasons over any given year).

Other stuff for milestone one included nicer 404 pages, WordPress upgrade and some other bits and bobs from phase one.

So, onto milestone two. During February we held three workshops – for venue hire, what’s on and learning. In these we got a load of people from all over the service together to map out who our users are and what they need from us for each. Ben over at fffunction is going to talk more about how we get from the workshops to the prototypes in a future post, but for now I’ll leave you with a couple of images to show where we are with our venue hire section. At the moment we’re testing the prototype and putting together some visual designs for it. I’m sure it won’t be long until it’s live, and in the meantime we’re starting to think about how we show our learning offer and enabling users to book workshops online.

visual
Visual designs for venue hire
prototype
Venue hire prototype

 

Websites coming out of the woodwork

Websites

Screenshot of the portcities websiteI’ve worked at Bristol Museums for just over two years now, and still now and then I’ll be chatting to someone or receive an email saying “oh, did you know that such and such website is ours?” Which I then add to my growing list and maybe have a little grumble to myself about.

Now, on the one hand, it’s great that people are telling us about these (anyone else want to let us know of any more, please?) but on the other it creates a bit of a headache for us in keeping track of exactly what content of ours is online and how people are using it.

It’s easy to just assume that, because they’re pretty old and incredibly out of date in some (most) cases, that they’ve been forgotten about and people don’t use them. This isn’t necessarily the case, though.

One example of this is the Portcities website – http://discoveringbristol.org.uk/ – which was made around 2003. It gets a huge amount of traffic – just over 470k unique pageviews in 2014, which is coming up for nearly half of the amount we get to our main website www.bristolmuseums.org.uk (around 1m a year and growing).

I looked at the analytics for this with Jane from our Learning team recently, and there are some other interesting things that we can see:

  • There’s a dip in traffic over the summer and during school holidays, suggesting it could be being used as a learning resource
  • Most of the content looked at is about Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery
  • The main bulk of visitors (around 45%) are from the US. This is nearly twice as many visits than we get from the UK
  • 86% of visitors find the website from search

There’s clearly a purpose for this content, so we need to think carefully about what we do with it. We’re working really closely with our Learning team to try to map this out, find the opportunities and see what we can do to best serve these users.

bristolmuseums.org.uk – Phase Two Planning

Websites,

We’re now starting work on phase two of our website, www.bristolmuseums.org.uk, as Zak has already mentioned. So here’s a bit more detail about what we’re planning, once again following the GDS phases of service design.

(Note: if you’d like to read about what we did for phase one, you’re in luck – we’ve lots of posts about it on this here blog.)

We’ll be working with the guys over at fffunction in three stages over the next three months. From an evaluation of user needs and developing on from phase one, we’re going to be focusing on things that generate revenue and make it easier for people to book with us; whether that’s improvements to the what’s on sections (which get the majority of visits), learning and venue hire.

Milestone 1 – January 2015

Updates and work carrying on from phase one on opening times, events filtering, navigation and what’s on sections.

Milestone 2 – February 2015

Workshops with the programming, learning and venue hire teams to really get to grips with what our users need from us online in these areas.

Milestone 3 – March 2015

Workshopping and implementing a ticketing solution for the above, making our online shop look a bit nicer and researching and implementing online donation functionality.

We’ll keep you posted with how it’s going and what we discover.

Moved by Conflict exhibition Character Points

Notes

Zahid Jaffer, Content Designer

Image of an ultra sonic sonsor
Ultra sonic sensor

Overview

The Moved by Conflict exhibition at M Shed is comprised of many different types of technology to interpret content, from projectors to speakers.  We used some new technology we haven’t used in the past to deliver this content, notably the RFID tag system.

We had several briefs, but the one that stands out is: visitors need to have a personalised experience through the exhibition; the ability for visitors to have content of their choice delivered to them in the exhibition through digital means. The idea was to have stories being told through video, and we worked with Bristol Old Vic to bring a more theatrical performance to these stories.  We had actors playing six fictional characters telling their stories, which would capture their lives before, throughout and the end of the First World War.

Concept 

We needed a way for visitors to trigger the content when they wanted to experience it. Initially we wanted hidden video screens (projections) around the exhibition and when a visitor walked next to it the video magically appears for them. To do this we looked into iBeacons, a Bluetooth technology which can be used to trigger an activity from a specified distance to the user, for example playing a sound when someone gets within two metres of a loudspeaker. Our concept was when someone gets to within a metre of a screen the content appears and when they leave that area the content turns off. The trigger device would be a visitor’s smartphone or a small Bluetooth transmitter/tag.

Image of a media player
Media player

After a lot of research we found that this would cost a lot of money and would take a lot of time to develop – this technology is still very new, which is why it costs quite a bit. We looked then at long-range RFID technology, but this was also outside of our budget.  We decided to go for short-range RFID, so a visitor would need to pick up an RFID wrist band and scan it in a specific location, as we were still keen on the idea of the content being triggered when you get to a certain distance.  To do this we’d need to use a sensor, which wouldn’t trigger the main content but would trigger an intermediate screen, such as an image with instructions on it informing  you what to do with the RFID wrist band.

Once we had finalised the concept we started looking into the equipment that would enable us to do what we wanted. We looked at a number of options, ultimately what we went for worked very well.  The content is displayed on a 24 inch screen, used in portrait orientation. There is an actor speaking to camera, with their head and shoulders in shot, giving the actor lifelike dimensions.  We needed something that would play the content and to be able to accept triggers so we looked in to Raspberry Pi. For what we wanted to do there would be a lot of programming and coding, and we were also not sure if the Raspberry Pi would be instant enough on the triggering as we were informed  Raspberry Pi could have a slight delay in triggering hd content.  We wanted instant triggering and relatively easy setup/programming as we were limited on time, so we went down the route of a media player.

We selected a Brightsign hd1020 media player which has GPIO and allows you to connect buttons to trigger content, and also has USB input so you can connect a keyboard to it. The programming of this media player is relatively easy to do as it has graphical programming software you load on to your pc. These three elements were what we needed to make our concept work.

photos of the Character point (left), directional speaker (middle) and inside the character point (right)
Character point (left), directional speaker (middle) and inside the character point (right)

Concept to Reality 

The GPIO is connected to an ultrasonic sensor, which sends out a high pitched audio noise (well above human hearing) and listens for the echo to return. The sensor allows you to increase or decrease the sensitivity, meaning you can set the distance of how far you want it to trigger. It also has a ‘stay open state’ and ‘stay closed state’ feature, so when a person is watching the content the sensor will stay in an open state (as it is still detecting an object in front of it) and once the person steps out of the sensor’s range it will switch to a closed state and the content will finish.

The USB port on the media player is used to connect a USB close range RFID reader. This reader detects the RFID wrist bands that visitors pick up.  We’ve also used a directional speaker to limit sound spill in the gallery and to give the visitor a more personal experience.  With all these elements combined, the way it works is;

  1. On the screen the visitor sees a static attractor image
  2. As the visitor gets closer to the screen, the motion sensor will detect them
  3. This will trigger the content on the screen to change to an image with instructions asking them to scan their RFID wrist bands on the pink square (the RFID reader is directly behind the pink square)
  4. This will trigger the content.
Photo of a Media player and audio amplifier
Media player and audio amplifier

If visitors read the instructions and decide they don’t want to view the content they can step away and the sensor will detect there is no one in front of it and switch to the attractor image. If a visitor decides to trigger the video content with the RFID wrist band and decides that they’d rather not watch any more, they can step away and the sensor will detect there is no one there, so the video will end and go back to the attractor image. In the exhibition we have six of these RFID interactives; we’ve named them Character Points.

Concept to Reality Issues

We quickly realised that there was an issue with the triggering. We found that the sensors were not staying in the open state; they would go into a closed state and open state repeatedly which meant the content wasn’t staying on the screen for long. To overcome this we bought a timed relay and wired it in to the sensor. The relay activates when the motion detector senses a person and holds the sensor in an open state – we set the time of this to 10 seconds. The relay gets activated even when it’s holding, meaning it will continuously reset the timer to 10 seconds as long as it’s detecting something. Now when a person steps away from the sensor’s range the content will stay on screen for 10 seconds then switch back to the attractor screen.

Photo of the internal components of the character points
Internal components

Another issue we had was that some visitors decided to poke their fingers through the holes that the sensor’s microphones stick out of. These need to be visible otherwise the sensor will not work (you can see these microphones in the photo of the sensor above). The sensor would get dislodged and fall inside the character point. We tried using glue and silicone to stick these sensors to the door, but visitors still managed to push the sensor through. We found good old gaffer tape held the sensor in place and can withstand a lot of force if someone tries to push the sensor through.

Now that we have the equipment to do this kind of interactivity, we’ll be using it in other interactives. Hopefully in the future we can expand on this to make it in to a long-range RFID system.