I’m Mark Pajak, a documentation officer for the Bristol Culture service. I have just tested the hidden museum app before starting work today. This is my first experience with the app so its all new and I have no preconceptions to cloud my first impressions of it.

Design

A simple and colourful ‘oversized’ design was very easy to navigate with big buttons.

Usability

I didn’t read any instructions except for those written inside each button, so following the steps the app wanted me to take was straightforward. In some cases real life got in the way of my game play, such as an impromptu meeting, but I can’t fault the app for not knowing the museum was closed before 10 so the upper gallery was locked – or can I??

Fun

Yes, as a VERY regular museum visitor I am fairly locked into a routine so anything out of the ordinary is novel, and there are still many galleries I rarely visit – so a random object hunt was fun, and cut through the usual formalities of gallery interpretation & object arrangement to surprise me. not just with an object, but with new information about something I would normally not stop to look at.

Bugs

There was a lag on the scrolling when picking an avatar, other than that I didn’t detect anything the app looked like it wasn’t supposed to be doing.

Other stuff

It took a while to realise the app could tell which direction I was pointing in, though with hindsight my iPhone can do that so that’s just what they do,  which led me to consider how and why it might use that information,  and it gave a certain ‘big brother’ feeling, but doesn’t everything these days? Also I have a slight aversion to taking photos with an ipad, but that’s just me :).

Features

I could imagine someone wanting to chose a different object just because they arent fussed about climbing many stairs, but I guess that’s where kids come in – the challenge of winning the game is probably enough to get feet moving.

Overall

Simple, quick, attractive and fun – which is impressive and means there are some clever things going on ‘behind the scenes’, or at least that’s my preconception.

Supporting evidence for milestone 4.2 – informal user testing