How would you define a successful family experience?

So here’s the first of a few posts that explore the themes within our latest report. But first, take a look at this viral video from Sesame Street based on another successful viral advert found here.

Over on tonic.com creators of sesame street had this to say

“We hope that we can think of everyone as a potential fan of Sesame Street, essentially from 2 to 92.” Ludwig says, “I think that the Old Spice spoof is a perfect example of where we have successfully created content that is actually engaging for people of any age, and when we can do that, then I feel like we really hit it.”

“The best thing that comes out of it all of this,” he says, the pride evident in his voice, “is that parents that may not have been doing so for one reason or another, are sitting down with their kids and watchingSesame Street.”

So, how does this link to the ‘Family & Smartphones report’? Well, it’s to do with family behaviour.

When we started the report our key objective was to see if  ‘Smartphones’ could be used to improve a ‘Family Experience’ at a museum. Therefore one of the key questions had to be around what visitors see as ‘successful family visit’. We had been prepared for a wide range of answers, what we hadn’t really appreciated was the correlation between the comments and the rating of the experience. For example, comments relating to poor family experiences tended to focus the lack of basic services. There is an expectation – a need even – for somewhere to park a stroller/pushchair or change a nappy. Once this is addressed  you start to find comments on the choice of food in the cafe, the level of space to run around or how ‘interactive’ the exhibits are – in other words, is the museum designed for children. But the holy grail of the museum family experience was often described as where  EVERYONE in the group is engaged/entertained/learning – adults and children alike. Just like the Sesame Street viral ad campaign, just like Shrek or the Simpsons. That shared experience where a family truly gets time to enjoy an activity together turns out to be very special.

So could smartphones help ‘improve’ the family experience? Through the process we realised a couple of things a) smartphones won’t help a cultural institution that doesn’t have basic facilities (although granted, it could help set the expectation before arrival). b) to develop a mobile experience that engaged just the junior visitors is lovely but in order to have a truly memorable experience you need to include the whole family. For TV producers this means getting the tone and level of content right for a very diverse audience. But for mobile experiences designed for museum this also means creating an experience that considers group dynamics, audience personalities, physical environment and interface.  This is where we see the opportunity, Smartphone technology – with larger high resolution screens and the potential for richer interactions, gaming and play  – can help us break free from the older, more individualistic, models of mobile interpretation.

Not rocket science – but an interesting element to ponder. How many cultural organisations are developing content for the whole family? And does mobile offer a different opportunity for them because of the nature of the medium?

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Families and Smartphones: The Report

Late last week and earlier this week, we started sending out our completed report to all those who expressed an interest. You can see a brief description here and drop us a line if you’re interested in seeing a copy. [Update: You can now download a copy here )

The research originally came from work Alyson and I had completed and observations we had made about how friends had started using iPhones with their families. We wondered if it families had access to smartphones but also how they were using them and if this audience crossed over to the cultural sector.

The whole process has been fabulous - terrifying – but fabulous.  The terrifying part came from devising, developing and writing our own report based on our own ideas. The brilliant part came from the overwhelming response to the survey – in terms of respondents and people wanting a copy of our results – to the support we’ve received writing the report.

We had help from lots of different people. Suzy Sarraf  from AAM Media&Technology gave us access to her HUGE online network. Matt at Fusion Analytics answered my SOS when I realised my questionnaire was completely in appropriate for the size of response. Abi Hackett helped us unpick all the comments into a coherant structure. Lastly and very importantly an impressive list of reviewers who took time to read and reflect on what we had written. There feedback was invaluable not only for checking we spoke sense, but encouraging us to get it out to people.

So now we hope, over the next few weeks, to review some of the key themes that came about as we went through the reports. We’re starting to put together a schedule of follow up reports. If you want to receive these, you can sign up for emails or an RSS feed here.

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We’ve arrived…

So we’re finally here – on the web – with our ‘new branding’.

What a wonderfully challenging process creating your own website is. As a digital organisation we’re not the only ones with a website suffering from ‘cobblers children’ effect.

Anyway, we hope you like it. We’re particularly proud of our branding. Created by the wonderful Kirsty (whose day job is for a very well known branding agency) we think she manages to capture exactly what we were looking for without us even knowing it!

But one thing I wanted to flag was how much we learnt from being the folks doing the briefing.

We often work with organisations who provide us with a brief and we respond by offering ideas as to what we believe is the right ‘audio/mobile voice’ to fit the not only the needs of their audience but also communicate who they are. Often, we tentatively hand over our strategy or creative treatments with great trepidation – ‘will they like it?’, ‘is this what they expected?’.

So, this time we sat on the other side of the table and I must say it was even more nerve wracking. But, Kirsty delivered. In fact she delivered so well — we have to admit we aspire to be the company she had designed.

The next stage for us is slowly taking responsibility for the design and the implementation of our brand and again, I realise how nervous I feel and how much we’re going to learn from this process too.

Anyway…

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