Niklas Gustavsson interview and state of the art analysis

Museum interview!

I conducted my interview with a spanish man in his late 20's, the focus of my interview was to find out what he thought could be improved in museums. We have decided to target tourists, and went to naturhistoriska riksmuseet to find tourists to interview!

The interview went like this:

Hello, we are students from the mediatechnology program at KTH and are currently doing a study, mind if we interview you?

Not at all, I will try to answer any questions I can!

Do you usually visit museums?

Every time I am in a new city, I try to visit museums!

Allright, why do you usually visit museums?

Because I like to know more about the countries history. I like going to armory museums, and national history museums!

What goal do you have coming to a museum?

My goal is always to learn more about the country, and the history of the country. I want to know as much as possible.

Do you think there is enough information about the exhibitions here?

I think this museum is good, because it has a lot of information – but I would like to have more, sometimes there is not enough information about what I am looking at!

Oh okay! Do you think that can be improved upon somehow?

Maybe if they add more information.

If technology wasn't a problem, do you think some sort of technology could be helpful for this?

Yes! Maybe if they make like an application that I can look at the things, and more information pops up, or maybe they have some computer that I can look about what I want more in detail.

What do you think this app or computer should be able to do?

It doesn't have to be something big.. just that maybe I can take a picture of something in the museum, and the app tells me where it is from and the history about it. This would be really good in armory museums, because there is a lot of information about everything there, which isn't in the museum.

Would you download an app like that for the museum, even for a small cost?

Yes! But I think that maybe I would stay in the museum for a very long time, because I want to know everything about everything, haha!

State of the art analysis!

I decided to look at a computer game at the naturhistoriska riksmuseet, which basically was that you get 10 questions about the exhibition you are currently at, which have 3 different answers for each question, which one of them is correct.

For my usergroup, tourists, this piece of device was absolutely horrendous. There were several games like this in the museum, and some of them (if not all of them) did not have an option to do the quiz in English – rendering it useless.

However, if we decide to look away from the fact that English speaking tourists could not do the quiz, it had good and bad parts. First of, it is always very good to have interactive things in a museum, as people want to play games and get very happy when they answer the questions correctly.

It was very slow, and people lost interest halfway through, because you had to wait 20-30 seconds between each question for the next one to load. But I strongly believe that if you would have had a decent computer run the quiz, it would have attracted a lot of people. Everyone likes going around in a museum, and trying out every piece of technology they can find, which makes this application target almost everyone (except maybe older people who feel they do not understand the product).

So what I took from this piece of technology is that it is always good to have something interactive, because it really helps in attracting people to use the device. Also, it is essential that it is multi-language compatible, so that everyone has the opportunity to use it. People also lose interest in slow things, because they get very bored, and therefor move on to the next exhibit.

So what our group needs to focus on is to make some sort of a product that moves very smoothly, that is interactive enough for people to want to use it which is also compatible for several languages, making the target group bigger!