We envisage an accessible user interface for installation on a touch screen kiosk in a museum exhibit. It could be aligned with a particular exhibit or it could be a stand-alone feature for visitors to explore. In either case, the group of museum professionals that participated in the discussion described two main challenges, unique to the museum audience, that the user interface would need to overcome:
- The interface would need to cater to a wide variety of users including K-12 students, adults, and mixed generation families. This compares to the classroom use of the interface that can be tailored to a specific audience (e.g., non-science major undergraduates).
- Interaction with an interface in the museum is voluntary unlike in the classroom where students are given an interface-based assignment that they must complete. By contrast, museum visitors tend to flit from one thing to another in a space where there are many other eye-catching interactive opportunities. As a result, the interface needs to convince the audience to stop and interact.
A quote from one of the meeting participants summarizes this:
“So one, thing that art museums think a lot about is strategies for close looking and getting [younger] audiences … to really pause and reflect and take in a work. So there are strategies in engaging interactively with kids or young visitors, but also the way you design an exhibit and invite a pause and reflection and looking for specific things…”
Meeting participants discussed various strategies for overcoming these challenges that we divide into three categories:
A striking interface to catch the attention of museum visitors
A museum is filled with interactive exhibits and eye-catching artifacts that all compete for visitor’s attention. An interface to access specimen data needs to be striking and engaging with simple browse functionality. Ideas discussed included map-based interfaces or virtual clouds of specimen thumbnails that a user can “fly” through, navigating by selecting from a group of preset categories. One user suggested making a large vertical wall display for the interface to catch people’s interest. One thing was clear, the interface should definitely not rely on a scientific name search box. An example of a visual search interface can be seen at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco.
The features we discussed were summarized by this participant:
“they made a kind of little room completely lined with slides. And, and it looks like stained glass and you walk into the room. And you could potentially look very closely at each of the slides. I don’t know exactly how they organized it, whether it’s similar things are grouped together, or whether it could just be colors are grouped together”
Another participant quote illustrates the challenge of designing a compelling interface for museum use that quickly draws a user into the experience:
“They’re these little thumbnails with text and you click on them … there’s so many clicks to get to something that is immersive and inspiring to look at. And after all the trouble we spent on that we decided, you know what, we just we just need to get a flickr account. Because the way that flickr works is it’s all about visual experience.”
Make a connection between people and plants by using exciting categories:
Meeting participants suggested several ways to connect people and plants in an engaging way that would draw users into the interface experience and hold their attention:
- Medicinal plants
- Food plants
- Poisonous plants
- House plants
- Plants close to home
- Cultural connections
- Economic botany
The goal would be to make the specimens an entry into a web of extended information. It would provide a way to tell stories about different specimens and put the plants into a humanistic, larger context.
For example: poison ivy and mangos are in the same plant family and both contain the chemical urushiol, which can cause allergic reactions. This explains why some people are strongly allergic to mangos and break out into a rash when they eat the fruit!
This participant quote sums up the idea:
“something we’re all familiar with….the family that contains poison ivy is the same family that contains mango and and it’s a pretty interesting family … Just having having a visitor to Museum get a chance to learn that and see some images and think about what’s related to my favorite fruit? … And it wouldn’t just need to be limited to food, it could be: show me 10 things that are related to mango … some that you know and some you’ve never heard of …
In addition to linking up specimen images, there could be ways to bring in photographs of live plants or botanical illustrations (e.g. http://www.plantillustrations.org/)
A game-based approach
Another approach discussed by participants was to design features that allowed users to participate in “botanical games.”
One idea was to build a plant from a set of characters and traits and see what local species match. Another option would be to allow users to build and curate their own “exhibit” for species and specimens they are interested in or feel connected to. These virtual exhibits could be shared with other users in a similar way to the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab.
Connecting the interface to exhibits in the museum could be another way to make a more compelling interactive experience. For example, if the Museum was running an exhibit on “Trees of North America,” a curated set of specimens and other images could be loaded onto the kiosk and game-based activities could be built around this dataset.
Categorize plants in lay-person terms
Too often non-expert uses are overwhelmed by scientific jargon when confronted with scientific specimens and species identification. Art museums face a similar problem. There is a large vocabulary to describe technical aspects of paintings and drawings that often throws up a barrier. For plants, simple description terms based around flower color or plant size or leaf shape would help users engage with the data and lower barriers to entry into the world of scientific collections.
Two participant quotes summarize these points:
“Even something as simple as you know, branching patterns … they ask for swirly, something that looks like a doily shape, something that’s bell shape … it’s more approachable, and it fits into their their needs and their way of seeing and doing and changing and experimenting, to just have the forms”
“…and art museums have the same problem, where art historians have a particular way of describing things. That’s not the way the public usually thinks about it … The Barnes foundation interface lets you look for lines or curves or shapes of different types and find artworks that have those patterns in them.”
