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The New England Aquarium offers complete and detailed information regarding its exhibitions and locations through its [website|http://www.neaq.org/index.php], maps (see Image \[2\]), and even interactive screens (see Image \[3\] and \[5\]) in the building. However, due to the large number of exhibits and animals (and more importantly, how they relate) coupled with the complicated and non-intuitive layout of the interiors, a simple task, e.g., finding a specific animal like the [little blue penguin|http://www.neaq.org/animals_and_exhibits/animals/little_blue_penguins/index.php] in the museum, can be daunting and time consuming. Visitors usually have limited time budgets and come in with very little planning. Most of them try to obtain as much information inside the building as possible in order to find what they are interested in visiting, being able to attend various exhibitions, and successfully coveringcover most of the locations. |
Difficult tasks
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The aquarium has an interactive touchscreen wall with information regarding the animals. WeOne mightwould think that this could be an interactive aid to find information about animals-sessions-places, but we only found information about some animals. The way the system work is by presenting a set of moving bubbles with the picture of one animal inside (See Image \[3.a\]). After selecting one bubble, an information pop-up is shown with short information about the animals (See Fig. 3b). In some of them it is possible to keep navigating and watch videos and pictures (Image \[3c\]). This seems to be a good idea, however, we found several problems from the usability point of view. In terms of visibility, the bubbles are very small as well as the animal picture and the font size and the icons presented in step 2 (Image \[3b\]). This affects the perceived affordances and because of that learnability is not very good. |
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This is a couple in the range 30-40 years old with to kids in the range 6-8 years old visiting the Aquarium in a weekday for recreation-education purposes. They both bought the tickets at the entrance and didn't know you can buy them in advance through the website. They walked throughout the aquarium following the main path and didn't know about an exhibition that was running in a different space that is hidden before the main entrance. They were not looking at specific tanks because it's hard to find out where is what so they just follow the main path and looked around. They didn't know about any interactive aid for information about the animals, which was quickly discovered by the kids who starting pressing options as a game but not really getting to understand what was happening. The parents were not interested in interacting with the system.
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Parents with a kid of 8 years old on weekend. They didn't buy the tickets in advance but while doing the long line to buy them, the staff informed about the access to the express line if they buy the tickets online using their cellphones so they did. The kid wanted do find the little blue penguins (which are advertised all over the place) but they were temporarily moved to another place and it was time consuming to find them. The parents where interested in teaching science facts to the kids but it was difficult to read from the information on the walls so after a while they got tired.
Lessons learned:
(Fig. (?)Wiki Markup Specific species can be temporarily moved and this makes even harder to locate the right place given that the maps in the walls are static
(Image \[2b\]).
- Lines during weekend for buying tickets can be considerable longer than on weekdays. The staff tries to solve that by informing on the fly them about the website but we observed that only few people actually responds to this information.
- Parents with kids are a very frequent user class on both weekend and weekdays.
- Comment: for buying the tickets from your cellphone, you need to register in the website which is inconvenient.
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Group of elementary school class with teachers from the local area. Visiting on weekend. This was a educational visit consisting of about 15 kids. They decided to follow the main path of the aquarium and stop in exhibitions if they found one. The teachers didn't use the maps handouts provided at the entrance and preferred to rely in the staff guidance. They had the opportunity to watch two exhibitions.
Lessons learned:
- big Big groups are less interested in specific details and more attracted by informative interactive sessions conducted by staff.
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We didn't have access to interview the staff during these visits because it's necessary to be authorized first. However, after observations and getting familiar with the dynamics of the staff that is visible to the visitor, we can anticipate the following main user classes relevant to the problem we are analysinganalyzing.
- Administrative. staff dealing with tickets, advertising and high-level organization of the staff scheduling, such as exhibition, places, animals locations.
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