Mobile Interpretation and the importance of Stakeholders

We’ve been lucky enough to have a workshop proposal accepted at Museums and the Web this year in San Diego. It’s a workshop we’ll be leading with Sandy Goldberg from sgscripts entitled “Bringing your Stakeholders Onboard: Delivering Vibrant Mobile Projects”

We planned the workshop, after a few clients had talked to us about the challenges they were facing pulling mobile projects together and facilitating the collaboration, which is so often needed. I’m pretty sure that most projects need some form of collaboration but it seems to be that in-gallery digital interpretation, and in particular mobile, needs input from a particularly wide group to ensure a successful roll out. We regularly work on projects that involve the input of as many as seven different departments and ensuring they all feel ownership of the project is a real challenge. And I’ve seen many a project that could have been transformed from poor to good or good to great with just a little more collaboration up front.

Getting the right people involved at the right time can often address those challenges faced at the beginning of a project:

• How do we make sure we have the right information in there without being overwhelming?
• How do we create the content and keep it up-to-date when we have little budget?
• How do you make sure the technical system does what it needs to do?

Or, even more common, the questions that get asked once the system is up and running a while and the impact of decisions made at the development stage are playing out on the floor in the gallery:

• How do we stop this negatively impacting on visitor flow?
• What happens if the visitor has a problem, how can they get help?
• How do we get more people using the system?
• Staff are reluctant to promote the system because they are worried it will reduce shop sales/attendance at live talks

One of the toughest things in our experience is gauging when to bring people into the process and what level of involvement they should/could have.  We all enjoy the creative input of our colleagues but fear those huge brainstorming meetings where everyone goes around in circles o even worse, stakeholders holding up or derailing the whole project.

Here are a couple of ideas on how to work with your stakeholders. We hope you’ll join us in San Diego to hear more.

Cast your net wide early on

At this point you may well have identified the broad vision or goal for the project. What you need next is support and to identify the parameters you’ll be working within (refine vision, flush out challenges and boundaries, identify which teams we are talking about) Ensuring everyone is on-board with this focus/vision will make everything a lot easier later on. For example, ensuring that the audience is agreed on and any operational challenges of using mobile devices can help you to ensure that curators are giving you the right level of content when it comes to development.  Recently we worked with the Science Museum to develop a schools programme. Including the person who manned the phones and took the School bookings helped us to stay focussed on the needs of the teachers and how the project could be sold to them without putting them off with complicated talk of mobile technologies.

Make sure they are comfortable with the technology

We’d also suggest that everyone on the team is given access to a mobile device for a few weeks to see how they use it, what do they do on it, where they use it. The number of design meetings we have had where the leader of the group uses mobile ALL the time while the rest are unfamiliar and lack confidence is frightening.

Testing the Idea

Mobile experiences inside the museum succeed and fail more often on the practicality of operations than anything else and don’t be fooled, this is as much to do with the pace and location of content as it is to do with signage. Midway through the process you’ll want to start testing concept and – most importantly – asking the group you have involved to help you solve the problems using their expertise. This is where your visitor services and marketing teams will come into their own — ignore their advice at your peril!

Everyone Involved

Towards the end of the development process, involve as many people in testing as possible. Particularly volunteers and those who will come into contact with your visitors – the impact of engaging them and showing them how this mobile experience will benefit the visitors and fit into their daily lives will improve your take up rate more than any signs, websites or leaflets.

For more information about the workshop – have a look here: Museums and the Web 2012 (MW2012): Workshops

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Once engaged emotionally we are, by nature, curious: Savage Beauty

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to make it to the ‘Savage Beauty’ exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition is a showcase of the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen and those that collaborated with him throughout his career. The exhibition was put together with impressive speed by The Met and many of those who knew McQueen following his suicide in February 2010.

When I arrived, the queues were over an hour long and, not being a particular fan of McQueen’s work I nearly gave it a miss. But with some good luck I managed to dodge the line and my reward for persistence was an exhibition that will stay with me for a very long time. Why? The exhibition is designed to be uncompromisingly emotional.

There are no silent, painted white rooms full of frameless glass boxes and educational interactives. Rooms are theatrically staged based on the title of the collections that each displays with smashed wooden panelling (Highland Rape), dark shop type shelves (The Cabinet of Curiosities) and aged mirrors (Romantic Gothic). Each room is filled with music and at points you’re asked to bend down and peer through a small hole at a 3D hologram or gaze almost at the ceiling at an enormous video screen placed above your head.

Attraction rather than Distraction

You might have thought all this obscure positioning, abstract lighting and emotional music might distract but the interesting thing was that instead it inspired exclamations of ‘His work IS art!’ from people stood close to me. For me, it inspired different emotional reactions as I went into each room – uncomfortable and suffocating, at times inspired and elated.

None of this should be surprising when you consider this impactful experience was designed by fashion show designers adept at walking the fine line of creating drama and spectacle while showcasing the objects (or should we say costume) and using all the tools available to them to do this.

Engagement: Emotion first

The level of audience engagement and interpretation about the works were audible. The inclusion of music not only set the tone of the gallery but also encouraged the chatter. Some of the talk was about whether you could wear that to the shops but a good percentage of visitors were debating the craftsmanship, the materials and the message the dresses communicated.

Given the short time available to put the exhibition together, the show is not overly large – there was just enough to leave me feeling I wanted more. However I also felt satisfied because the experience was well designed, well edited and emotionally engaging. I had experienced the McQueen showcase and I feel I now have a better understanding of why so many people go bonkers over couture. It was probably this too that lead me, like over 10,000 others so far, to buy the exhibition catalogue. At $45 and 2kg of my luggage allowance you can see just how powerfully this show affected me.

The exhibition was a reminder to me about the impact great content can have on a visitor experience but also what makes great content:

• The exhibition explained to me why I should give a damn about the work of McQueen by engaging me emotionally first, leaving me to want to learn more about the facts. I was pulled in, heart first.
• There is a need for craftsmanship when creating emotionally engaging experiences that don’t detract from the works. Each element of the design and content was used because it added to the overall experience with nothing excessive or unnecessary. It was then seamlessly combined allowing me to focus on the objects but use my emotional intelligence to understand them further.
• An experience can be choreographed for the visitors to be curious and discover without lots of interactivity and digital jiggery pokery. Once engaged emotionally we are, by nature, curious.

With this in mind, I started to think of some of Frankly, Green + Webb’s favourite content, the stops we share when people ask us for great examples. All of these clips are emotional. The majority of the clips use highly trained writers, sound designers or passionate communicators but all of them are well thoughtful and well crafted.

Quite often it’s difficult to describe why each clip works – but inevitably – after listening each makes sense. Perhaps this is part of the challenge with creating emotionally engaging content – the magic that happens is hard to describe and often needs a skilled hand to execute but as The Met is seeing from the queues at the door and the catalogue sales in the shop – the rewards is an engaged audience eager to learn and share.

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MUSE Awards go Mobile

A few months ago we were fortunate enough to be asked to lead the judging panel for one of the American Association of Museum’s MUSE awards. The category was for augmented reality and gaming and on Monday night in Houston I joined the other judges up on stage to announce the winners. I’m thrilled to spread the good news that Tate Trumps by the UK’s very own Tate Modern and Hide & Seek took the gold in our category with Balboa Park’s Online Collaborative and Writerguy’s Giskin Anomaly Survey project picking up the silver.

Its always a pleasure to be involved in these events – a chance to see some great work, get together with other folk in the business and see the world through the lens of their particular expertise. It’s also a chance to do a bit of trend spotting. Last year’s Horizon Report for Museums from MIDEA forecast that within 12 months mobile would “enter into mainstream use for museum education and interpretation”. The report noted “Mobiles represent an untapped resource for reaching visitors and for bridging the gap between the experiences that happen in museums and those that happen out in the world.” Two to three years out they forecast augmented reality going mainstream. If some of the other winners of MUSE awards are anything to go by they were pretty much spot on: 2010/11 is the moment that mobile finally came of age.

In addition to the audio guide category, the fabulous StreetMuseum augmented reality app from the Museum of London & Brothers and Sisters took the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity award whilst another augmented reality multimedia guide – the 9/11 Memorial app - picked up the best mobile application. MOMA picked up a gold for its MoMA AB EX NY iPad app in the application and API category. I could go on but you get the picture.

Mobile is blossoming across the sector and the most interesting applications of the technology are those that bring to bear the innate characteristics of the platform (portable, locative, playful, emotionally engaging, personal, social) on the user’s needs and interests and the organisational mission. These experiences are simple and delightful to use, they surprise us, move us, open our eyes to the world around us. They connect our all to brief moments within a museum to our lives beyond.

Experiences such as Tate Trumps and StreetMuseum are notable in that they have broken free from the old paradigm of the audio tour to open up new ways of using mobile for informal social learning. And where audio is used – the 9/11 Memorial app for example – it is with a freshness and lightness of touch that gives a great medium a new lease of life.

Less visible in projects we’re seeing in the sector right now are locative-based services – services linked explicitly to the users’ current location and often prioritized by the known interests of the user. The Horizon report placed these alongside augmented reality but progress seems to have been slower. We see a huge opportunity here not just for learning applications but for commerce, sponsorship and fund raising.

The 2010 Horizon Report placed gesture based computing and the semantic web on what they call the ‘Far Term’ horizon. I’m looking forward to this year’s report, due out in August, but my best is that gesture based interactions are going to go mainstream far quicker than anticipated. The success of this form of interaction in gaming has been phenomenal and has drawn in individuals who previously had no interest in such activities. We think there remains huge scope to use this same approach to connect visitors more dynamically with exhibits.

A final thought. I was really struck by how much of the talk out on the conference floor and in the exhibitors area was all about QR codes. Here at Frankly, Green + Webb we find ourselves firmly in the skeptics camp for the moment. We have seen few really successful projects out there and little hard data to support their value – so if you have something that you feel can firmly change our mind… drop us a line.

Update: Writerguy has written a guest post on Museum2.0 about the lessons learned from making Giskin Anomaly. Both the post and the comments are definitely worth a read.

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What could Museums learn from the Scrabble app?

I don’t know about you but every now and then I have one of those little moments when I’m using an app where I suddenly spot the difference between the translation of a service onto mobile and a truly mobile service – you know that moment when you see just how smart someone is, how they really get the medium. One of those moments came this week when I realised that my partner and I have completely given up on the Scrabble app – one of my first purchases on acquiring my iphone – and are now devotees of Words with Friends. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just happened and looking at the latest Distimo report it seems we’re not alone – Words with Friends is now in the top ten for free and paid apps for iphone and the top ten free apps for Android in the US.

But what is it that makes the difference? How did this upstart app beat the tried and trusted brand that is ‘Scrabble’?

Well my Scrabble app is a faithful, well-branded and nicely designed rendering of the classic game onto a smartphone format by EA. It allows you to play alone – against the app that is – or via wifi with a friend. Words with Friends on the other hand allows you to play with friends wherever they may be (and is fully integrated with facebook) and over extended periods of time, to play against strangers and to have multiple games on the go. In other words (excuse the pun) it doesn’t assume the old paradigm of two or more people gathered together to play a game but starts from an understanding that mobile is anywhere you are and anytime you have a spare moment to ponder a move. I believe that it is this subtle but powerful distinction that has ousted Scrabble from my affections and left me thinking about how I can bring what I think of as truly ‘native mobile’ thinking into my projects.

But why should this matter to the cultural sector? Well, museums – to use the term in its broadest sense – have over the years built up great and trusted brands, often with global recognition. Research shows that audiences trust and value museums. This brand is a powerful tool that can help museums connect with their audiences in a crowded mobile world. But I would suggest that my little story is a sign that we can’t rely on brand alone or even previously successful formats. We need to think ‘native’ and break free from our old paradigms. If we don’t we may find ourselves playing catch up just like Scrabble who have just issued a new version of their app in the US that incorporates the Words with Friends functionality.

PS. To be fair I absolutely love the iphone/ipad combination apps from EA that allow you to use your phone as the tile holder and ‘pass’ them seamlessly onto the ipad ‘board’. Very cool!

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