GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis
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1. Problem Statement
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Difficult tasks
- Successfully traveling the building and finding everything.
- Accessing information regarding where exhibits are (e.g., which tank has a specific animal, or where/when will an exhibition take place).
- Creating and changing schedules on the fly in order to see multiple sessions in one visit, specially for the information sessions with expert staff.
Image 1: New England Aquarium exterior.
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2. Observations
A set of passive observations were conducted in different parts of the aquarium during two trips covering both weekdays and weekends for a total of approximately five hours in total. This allowed us to find some interesting problematic aspects of the visitor's experience.
The aquarium has different tanks an uncovered animal ambients in which the aquarium staff conduct exhibitions and informative interactive sessions about the animals. These exhibitions are conducted in several places at the same time and are very interesting for visitors as they allow for one-to-one conversation with experts. The staff members have a broad knowledge about the exhibitions, which attracts many visitors with questions. We noticed the schedule for these sessions is hard to find once inside the building. In fact, unless a schedule is prepared in advance, visitors are very likely to miss most of the exhibitions as they have close and overlapping times. Moreover, the interior layout of the building is very confusing. In other words, even when looking at a map that tells you exactly where you are and where another area is located, it is very difficult to get the intuition regarding how one must move within the building to get there. This is a problem that is hard to solve and even explain. However, CSAIL students can easily relate as the Stata Center has the same problem.
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Image 2: (a) Staff members during an exhibit. (b) One of the many maps found inside the building.unmigrated-wiki-markup
The aquarium has an interactive touchscreen wall with information regarding the animals. We might think that this could be an interactive aid to find information about One would 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.
Visitors expected more information from these interfaces such as where to find the each one of the species presented and also information about information sessions schedules.
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Image 3: Some of the interactive information devices. (a) Shows a large animated wall with tiny drops moving
up the screen. (b) The drops have very small images of animals, and touching them brings up a sub-menu with
options that lead to (c) more information. (d) Other devices have external keyboards.
Each tank has a a signboard with all the species on it. However it could be a challenge to match them because of lack of visibility. Font sizes are very small, contrast is uncomfortable, location is inconvenient and these problems are exacerbated when there are many visitors in the place.
Image 4: Some of the informative posters next to a small tank.
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3. Interviews
We conducted 3 interviews with the users.
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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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- 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 (Fig. (?)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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- Tourists:
- More frequent on weekends
- Groups with sizes ranging from one to three families.
- Have very limited time budgets.
- Usually no scheduling or planning is done beforehand.
- Have greater difficulty finding information through staff members and rarely discover interfaces
- Locals:
- More frequent on weekdays.
- Usually visit for education-recreation of kids.
- More time available to spend in the Aquarium.
- Some of them are already members of the aquarium.
Image 5: Adults tend to ignore the interactive screens because they don't assume
they have that purpose. Once discovered, most struggle with the small, hard to read
buttons and give up entirely. We saw that children usually discover the usability
quickly as they tend to touch everything. However, they don't seem to gain any
information as they play with the screen randomly.
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Image 6. Plot of relative amount of visitors of different user classes and how they are related.unmigrated-wiki-markup
It is also possible to identify the distribution of these classes considering their time-budget and planning behavior. Image \ [7\] presents this information graphically.
Image 7. Plot of the relative distribution of user classes according to time-budget and planning behavior.
3.2 Staff
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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