Our Product after the evaluation session.

Our product is a simple map application/interface with load-balancing properties. The map gives the visitors a clear, easy to use graphical interface which not only gives a simple representation of the current population levels in each of the galleries and in the restaurant, but also gives some information of each of the exhibits. The interface is essentially a top-down view of the museum floors, with each room containing a coloured symbol (pictured below) representing the current population status. This button is colour coded and changes depending on the population level in each gallery. The pictures below shows the different colours and what they represent.

The product comes in two forms. A larger map form, which can be displayed on panels in the museum, and a smartphone application. Another feature of the app is a collect-points-get-reward system where the user scans QR codes that are present in each exhibition. The codes are worth different amount of points depending on the current people load (e.g. a “green” room is worth the most and a “red” one the least) and when the goal is reached a coupon is earned which can be redeemed for a pastry in the cafeteria. This is probably not something for every app user but will hopefully promote migration to less populated exhibitions.

From the evaluation session we got a number of great suggestions for improvement ( these can be read about in an earlier blogpost). The suggestions were particularly related to the area of  buttons and availability. One of the main questions brought up was how the map was to be used if the user was colour blind. After reading on wikipedia we decided to keep colorblind people in mind when deciding the final color palette and layout but not to create an entirely separate “colorblind mode”.

Another upgrade we made was adding a statistic button (a very small one in the corner) which displays past information relating to the population levels in the current exhibits. This lets people see which exhibits have been very popular in the past, a piece of information some people might really enjoy. We want to keep the overall display very simple and clean, but we felt that adding a small button to the corner would not be too intrusive. A button we added to the smartphone version if the refresh button. This button refreshes the population indicators and gives the user a sense of tactile control over the application that an automatically updating solution wouldn’t provide.

The final upgrade that was proposed was a floor button which allows you to change between floors in a multiple story museum. This was a great suggestion since our group had completely forgot that many museums actually have multiple floors and having all the floors constantly shown on the screen would make the maps not only small but also leave the screens cluttered. This addition will no doubt make the map more legible and clearer to use.

All things considered the evaluation session was a great boon for our group. It gave us a chance to improve on key features and add vital upgrades that we might have missed had we not been able to have our product evaluated.

We noted this specific things in our design process.

We focused on one museum which meant that are designed was adjusted to fit that museum. Since our choice of museum was Fotografiska museet which has three different floors we thought an overlook using a sideview would be a good way to show the entire museum at once. If we would have chosen another museum, the option of only having the birdview, view from above, would have been more of a viable option, but in this scenario, sideview fitted us better.

We were thinking about adding more symbols to the prototype in the beginning, for example symbols representing if exhibits were new or are going to expire soon, but we skipped this in the final design to make the design look more clean and to avoid unnecessary clutter that do not help with are load balancing goal.