Museum
Telepresence museum experience
Designing for an inclusive museum experience
ROLE
Product Designer
Timeline
March - May 2024
Overview
Our telepresence museum experience is designed for inclusiveness and accessibility, and aims to provide online and virtual museum experiences for remote users, such as those with physical, financial, or geographical constraints. Users can navigate around the museum virtually, interact with others in real-time, and easily locate what they are looking for.
This is a semester-long project for the IDEA9105 Interface Design class at the University of Sydney. As a team of three, we were each responsible for designing a unique user flow for different devices. This project was more focused on the interface design rather than the overall product design process.
The Brief
To develop a speculative design concept that allows remote users to interact with a telepresence robot platform in one of the topic areas of museums, schools, or universities. Telepresence robots allow remote users to be virtually present through a physical robot that facilitates audio and video communication.
We chose to focus on museums as our topic area, developing a solution that aims to make museum experiences more inclusive and accessible.
The Problem
Some users face physical, geographical, and financial barriers that prevent them from visiting museums.
Why telepresence?
Telepresence allows users to be virtually “present” at a remote location, giving them control over what they see as they move the robot around, providing a more immersive experience than video conferencing.
Why museums?
People visit museums to enjoy art and culture and learn about the past and the world. It also brings communities together and educates future generations through engaging experiences.
People seek immersive experiences that transport them to different historical or cultural contexts, allowing for deeper engagement and understanding.
People value museum experiences with personalised narratives, fostering a sense of ownership over their learning journey.
People increasingly expect museums to integrate technology seamlessly into exhibits, providing additional layers of information and engagement.
Research
To define our target audience and understand their needs and motivations, we conducted an online ethnography through various online sources, such as Reddit communities, TikTok, Quora, Twitter (X), blog posts, and news articles and its comment sections.
Why do people like visiting museums?
What are people’s opinions and experiences on virtual museums?
What makes a museum exhibit worth seeing?
What are people’s perceptions on telepresence?
Why do people visit museums in person?
Are there any frustrations about going to museums?
From our research, we separated our findings into different themes in the visual below: immersiveness, geographical and financial constraints, interactivity, experience, accessibility and inclusion, and technology.
People value the ability to explore exhibits at their own pace, which virtual museums support through interactive and flexible experiences.
Physical, geographical, and financial challenges continue to hinder some people from visiting museums, highlighting the need for alternative solutions.
Virtual museums empower individuals with physical disabilities or mobility issues by offering them greater autonomy and access.
User Persona & Journey
To help guide our direction, we created 2 user personas based on our insights. We found that our primary users that would most likely use telepresence robots for a museum visit would be people with disabilities and teachers, due to the ability to interact with others in real-time without the need to be there physically.
Competitor Analysis
With telepresence robots in museums as the focus of our solution, we chose other museums who currently use telepresence robots as our direct competitors, and museums that offer virtual museums as indirect competitors, since they target a similar need of providing users a way of experiencing museums without being physically there.
Our competitor analysis focuses on the key activities, functionality, and navigation of each museum, and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses.
Key Insights
Consistency in navigation tools between different users is important
Additional accessibility features makes the experience more inclusive and user-friendly
Navigation tools such as floor plans make it easier for users to navigate through the exhibit
Being able to control where you go and know where you are is important
How might we use telepresence to create an interactive and accessible museum experience for people who are unable to visit in person?
Ideation
Online and virtual museum experiences provide more people the opportunity to visit museums if they are unable to due to physical, financial or geographical constraints.
While some museums offer virtual tours, visitors are unable to ask questions and interact with museum guides. Our design solution mainly focuses on people with disabilities, to provide them with a sense of autonomy, as well as teachers and school students, creating new learning opportunities for students.
Our solution allows users to:
Navigate around the museum on their own virtually via telepresence
Interact with others real-time at the museum
Easily locate what they are looking for, such as exhibits
For our project, we came up with three distinct user flows for different devices. My chosen device is a desktop computer, and the interface will focus on the user navigating through the museum.
This user flow focuses on how a user would find their way to the exhibit they want to visit after entering the museum through the telepresence robot. This highlights the tasks users would complete to reach the end goal of finding the exhibit.
Based on the user flow, I sketched various iterations and designs of the interface. I looked at various popular design patterns to ensure the look and feel of the interface is familiar and intuitive to users, reducing the learning curve and enhancing overall usability.
Initial User Testing
Usability tests were conducted with the initial lo-fi sketches, to test whether the user flow made sense to users and identify potential issues.
The main concern was that the first screen does not provide much context to the user, and may be confusing when users first enter. To mitigate this, a welcome screen interface was added to the user flow.
Prototyping
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
This wireframe highlights the process a user would take to reach the end goal.
Heuristic Evaluation
After validating the low-fidelity wireframe, the design was translated into a high-fidelity prototype to focus on the visual style, colours, typography and interactive elements that simulates the final user experience.
The initial high-fidelity prototype was evaluated based on the usability heuristics, which identified 2 minor issues.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Final Solution
Product Demo
Design System
Learnings & Takeaways
I found it challenging to need to fit our solution around a specific type of technology (telepresence) as there was limited information online about telepresence, and some of our research revealed that not everyone sees the need for it. However, this allowed us to explore more niche areas to find our target users.
As my first time using Figma and designing an interface, I learnt a lot about common design patterns and some of the best practices, and it helped me identify areas of improvement in my own design.