GARY AND STACY VISIT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

Our Visitors

Gary is a 43 year old Sales Manager for a Transportation Logistics company.
Stacy is a 37 year old Product manager for a organic food distributor

Pre-Visit

Gary and his wife Stacy rarely go to museums but Gary recently heard from his friend Steve that there was a really interesting Comic Art exhibition showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery this month. Gary discusses going to see the show with Stacy over a mid week dinner and they decide they would like to see the exhibit on the coming Sunday afternoon. Stacy plans most of the details when she and Gary have an outing so on the morning of their visit she decides to check out the museum web site for more details on hours, parking, admission prices, etc.

Stacy uses Google to find the museum web site and intuitively navigates to the "Plan your visit" section of the site once she arrives. Once there, Stacey easily finds information on hours, rates, and directions. Stacy then begins to explore the site a bit further. She clicks on a navigation link title "Exhibits" and the menu opens to expose sub options such as "Current Exhibitions" "Coming Exhibitions" "Past Exhibitions" etc. Stacy selects Current Exhibitions and the page refreshes to show a list with thumbnails of about 10 different shows currently on at the museum. Stacy sees the Comic Art show at the top of the list but also notes that the list she is looking at can be viewed in a map format. She clicks the map button and the page presents a color-coded map of the museum floor plan with a thumbnail image paired to each color-coded section. Stacy sees her Comic Art thumbnail and on roll over reviews the title and short description of the exhibit. Stacy can tell from the size of the colored section on the floor plan that she will be viewing a fairly large exhibit when she visits the museum that afternoon. Stacy clicks a "show more details" link and the map zooms to show more Comic Art thumbnails positioned on the map. The map has now zoomed in to show just exhibit space it self. In the top right corner of the map a menu of themes has appeared. Stacy reviews the 11 different themes for the exhibit and selects the "1970's Japanese Anime" theme. The map adjusts to center on the theme area and Stacy begins reading the description that appears. Stacy gets about half way through the description before she begins playing with a carousel of thumbnails that has also appeared just below the description. At this point Gary walks into the office and Stacy calls him over to the computer to see what she is looking at. She describes the mapping tool and shows him some the pieces in the Anime Picture Carousel. Gary is instantly interested and asks what other themes are included in the exhibit. Stacy shows the theme menu to Gary and together they explore a handful of other themes on the map. After about 5 minutes Gary asks Stacy what else she found on the site. Stacy recalls the "Tours" link she saw earlier, and backs out of the exhibits section to explore that further.

Gary and Stacy navigate to the web sites "tour" section where they see information about different types of tours as well as schedules organized by visitor type (students, researchers, returning visitors etc). This is mildly interesting but the couple's curiosity is peaked by a section titled "visitor generated tours". Stacy navigates to the visitor generated tours area for the Comic Art exhibit and finds a handful of tours created by previous visitors. She opens the first tour in the list (it appears to be voted most popular) and is presented with a similar interactive map she explored in the exhibits section. This interactive map has fewer thumbnails but those that are included present with a collection of links on rollover. Stacy clicks a link to explore and finds that it launches an external web page that appears to describe the historical timeline for Japanese Anime art. She returns to the link list and explores further external sources of content related to artifacts, including a YouTube video describing how to draw in the style of anime. While interacting with the tour map Gary notices an "email this tour" button in the top right corner. Stacy clicks the button and is pleased to see that they can send URL for this tour to their email account. Gary asks Stacy to send it to his GMAIL address and explains it might be fun to explore these tour links on his iPhone when they are in the exhibit later. Stacy sends the email to end their pre-visit website visit for the art gallery.

During the Visit

Gary and Stacy arrive at the art gallery just after lunch. They buying their tickets and along with their receipt, the clerk hands both visitors a plastic card. The clerk explains that visitors can use this card to make note of artifacts they find particularly interesting during their visit. They simply need to "swipe" the card at the card readers positioned by each artifact. Gary is also given the protocol for returning/submitting the card upon completion of their visit. Leaving the ticket counter, Stacy notices a large display that shows a layout of the museum ?oors. Overlaid on the museum map are glowing dots, each representing an object in the museum space. Some are glowing brightly, indicating many visitors have found the object interesting. Gary and Stacy enjoy their visit to the gallery. They swipe many different artifacts and even take the time over a coffee break to play with the interactive Tour map they sent to their iPhone earlier that day. Upon leaving the museum, both Stacy and Gary submit their card to the museum in exchange for a takeaway card with a unique, personalized URL. The URL is to a site that serves as a memory and archive of their visit.

Post Visit

Once at home Gary and Stacy log into their Unique URL to explore the interest collections they created during their visit. They are excited to see a summary of their favorite pieces displayed on the same exhibit map they explored before their visit. They are also excited to see that there are tools to associate thumbnails with links to outside content using the "add a link" feature. Gary realizes that this is how other visitors created the tours they were looking at before attending the museum. Through out the following week Gary spends a couple hours a night on the Internet conducting research on a variety of his favorite pieces. He adds a numerous of links to outside content to his favorites map. On Thursday night his is pleased with his creation and chooses to email his interest map to his friend Steve who had originally suggested he check out the exhibit. In the coming days Gary also sends his map to his brother, his parents, and his neighbor Charles.

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