Design Meeting - May 7, 2009

Prior Art

• Background research: what worked and what didn't work
• Grabbing at heuristics, design considerations from:
  • Academic literature/papers

• • Looking at existing museum content
    • Existing research done at individual museums
    • External museum content

Defining our Users

• Curators & exhibitions designers
• Museum visitors: Students, Families, Adults (What are the primary motivations behind museum visits, and how will that affect design? Exploration, education/learning, dates (couples), entertainment/amusement/play, special interest?)
• Museum non-visitors: find out why they don't go, and what might motivate them to go
• Educators/teachers who use the museum as part of their teaching/curriculum

User Research

• Interviews and Contextual Inquiries with Partner Museums on an on-going/iterative basis
  • Visit partner museums: McCord in May, DIA in July-ish, MMI in fall
  • Develop scenarios with local data, check scenarios against core partners (MMI, DIA, McCord, etc.)

• Ethnography with Local Museums
  • Doing on-going ethnographic research with a local museum (in Toronto, Barcelona, and Vancouver) on a weekly basis

• Survey with museum goers
  • Surveys: create our own, and see what museums have done already
  • Survey design: reaching broad visitor demographic. Online and on paper.
  • Qualitative research first, to help define the surveys (quantitative research)

• On-going design team meeting
  • Find a time for our team members in Barcelona, Toronto, Vancouver to meet regularly (weekly or more) to meet and discuss
  • Document meetings well for ourselves and community

Figuring out the Deliverables from User Research

• Personas: helpful but time-consuming
• Use scenarios that morph into prototypes