2. Leicester Castle Tells its Story
iBeacon-based mobile interpretation
Giasemi Vavoula, University of Leicester
Sally Coleman, Leicester Arts & Museums
Rheinallt Ffoster-Jones, Museum Wales
3. Digital R&D Fund for the Arts
• The project was funded by a grant from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts
(Nesta, Arts & Humanities Research Council and the National Lottery
through Arts Council England)
• The award was to develop BLE beacon-based heritage interpretation for a
historic building
• Project partners:
6. Starting point
What can BLE beacons do for an empty, listed
Castle that opens its doors to the public once a
month, with historical interpretation provided
only by sessional staff and printed information
sheets?
(and for dozens other historic buildings and
venues in similar situations?)
14. BLE beacons @ Leicester Castle
• Development & Evaluation Framework:
putting visitors at the centre
– Impact on visitors’ perceptions of
• Learning
• Enjoyment
• Environment
– Information
– Activities
– Learning opportunities
– Impact on visitors’ use & engagement with space
• Length of stay
• Pattern of stops at points of interest
16. Visitor perceptions of learning
“How much did you
learn about the
Castle during your
visit?”
z-Test App users
Non-
users
Mean 4.02 3.21
Known Variance 1.22 1.14
Observations 113 70
z 4.88
P(Z<=z) two-tail 1.05E-06
z Critical two-tail 1.96
17. Visitor perceptions of enjoyment
“Overall, how
enjoyable was your
visit to the Castle?”
z-Test App users
Non-
users
Mean 4.44 3.94
Known Variance 0.85 1.03
Observations 113 70
z 3.35
P(Z<=z) two-tail 0.000807
z Critical two-tail 1.96
18. Visitor perceptions of environment
“How would you rate
your experience of:
available information;
available activities;
learning
opportunities?”
19. Visitor length of stay
Declared time of start and time of end of visit
20. All 3 tours that utilised beacons at physical point of interest scored better
than tours that didn’t
Interactive guides (unordered list or timeline-based) scored worse than other
interpretation approaches
All tours were considered at least ‘OK’ by all visitors
Beacon vs non-beacon tours
25. What we’re learning from: tech attitudes
Visitors to other heritage sites in
Leicester (no app experience)
Castle visitors who have used
the Castle app
26. Summary – Lessons Learnt
• Beacon-based interpretation beneficial for learning and
enjoyment, and increases positive perception of the site
as learning environment
• Mixing with non-beacon mobile interpretation ok for
learning, but reduces enjoyment
• Potential of beacon logs to understand impact on visitor
use of space
• We design for learning-oriented visitors, but it is the
socially-oriented visitors who are more keen app
adopters
• Mobile confidence does not translate necessarily to
willingness to use in a heritage setting
• Mobile confidence and willingness to use increase with
good experiences
27.
28. Questions?
For more information contact:
Sally Coleman, Sally.Coleman@leicester.gov.uk (Arts Lead)
Giasemi Vavoula, gv18@le.ac.uk (Research Lead)
Rheinallt Ffoster-Jones, Rheinallt.Ffoster-Jones@museumwales.ac.uk
(Technical Lead)
Editor's Notes
The Leicester Castle app can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store – search for ‘Leicester Castle’.
Note that the Android app has two parts, ‘Leicester Castle Discover’ and ‘Leicester Castle Interact’.
The app is best experienced onsite, however, it can be used off site using the manual playlist. Using outside Leicester Castle will not give you the full beacon experience, but will give you a taste of the content and interpretation approaches.
Welcome to this Museum Practice workshop on iBeacon based mobile interpretation.
Introduce speakers:
Sally Coleman, Heritage Manager, Leicester Arts & Museums
Dr Giasemi Vavoula, University of Leicester School of Museum Studies
Rheinallt Ffoster-Jones, Museum Wales
I want to start with a bit of background on the project.
Leicester Castle Tells its Story is a project funded by Nesta, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, HLF and Arts Council England’s Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
Projects funded under this scheme bring together an arts organisation, a technology company and an academic organisation.
These were
Leicester City Council’s Arts and Museums Service,
Locly,
School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.
Our project also included a content developer, Metro-Boulot-Dodo, who brought extensive experience in the design of engaging heritage experiences.
Leicester Castle is a Grade I listed building with a medieval Great Hall containing two mid-Victorian courtrooms. It has a rich and varied history having been used to host Parliament on several occasions and the visits of various kings, including King Richard III.
The courtrooms have been witness to many trials including the notorious Green Bicycle Murder Trial in the 1920s. J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was a court reporter here.
It is a complex building to interpret but has plenty of fascinating stories to tell.
We open the Castle 10 times a year for Heritage Sunday events once a month.
Prior to the project, the only historical interpretation for casual visitors was an A4 information sheet – there were no regular permanent staff to provide tours or commentary on its history.
Most visitors were leaving the building unaware of its rich and important history and so improvements had to be made to historical interpretation.
Traditional interpretation methods such as information panels were impractical due to the courtroom furniture and employing human guides for the time it was open to the public was too costly.
This is where this project comes in. We wanted to encourage visitors to enjoy, appreciate and value this important city centre heritage building. Can BLE beacons help us do that? And can they help dozens other historical buildings and venues in similar situations?
What exactly are BLE beacons? They are little devices that have a unique ID each. They use Bluetooth to transmit their unique ID to the world. And, being low energy, they can do this for a very long time before their batteries run out – typically several months to a few years. So basically they will sit there and regularly cry out ‘hey there, I’m beacon A’ (repeat). So in themselves, they’re rather boring devices. But interesting things happen when a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled mobile device passes by and the device’s beacon app hears the beacon’s cries: the app can then use the beacon’s ID as filter, or as a condition variable, to fetch a certain piece of content or interactivity to the user. For this to happen the user need not do anything, other than having enabled Bluetooth on the device to start with. When they walk into the beacon’s range, their device with fetch and display content and/or interactivity automatically. If all that content sits in the app and the app is already installed on the user’s device, there is not even need for a Wi-Fi or a data connection.
And if you’re wondering what that range is, it is customisable and can range from a few centimetres to several meters. In fact, you can in principle layer the app’s reaction according to range – at 5 meters, show content A; at 1 meter, show content B; at 30cm, offer interactivity A. You could even observe the length of the user’s stay within the beacon’s range and use that to layer content presentation: as soon as they enter, present a short outline; if 20 seconds later they are still there, present some more detail; if 45 second later they are still there, present all the detail.
Importantly, you can also program the app to log the user’s trajectory by recording information about the beacons it encounters and the actions it takes. So at the end, you can have a quite detailed account of what the user did in the space.
So with the right app, a rather boring beacon can offer exciting visitors experiences.
Just to summarise what you need, it is BLE beacons, a beacon app, a BLE device to run the app, and a content and beacon management system to store all the content and beacon ID and location information.
Using Locly´s platform, a series of trails were created for the courtrooms.
30 beacons were placed in or under court furniture to identify specific points of interest that visitors had to reach to access location-specific content, for example the dock or reporters bench. A single beacon could trigger content on whichever trail the visitor was following on their device. We used blu-tack to discretely secure the beacons to furniture.
The trails used different interpretation techniques. The Green Bicycle Murder Trail is an audio tour that presents an emotive and immersive dramatisation of this infamous court trial that took place at Leicester Castle in the 1920s, almost like a radio play with actor´s voices, music and sound effects. Visitors are directed to specific locations in the criminal court to hear the court clerk open proceedings, the judge summing up, the accused in the dock giving his plea or the jury on the bench giving their verdict, all in the actual locations the trial was delivered from.
This tour has to be followed in sequence and audio instructions are given throughout.
The Court Audio Trail presents oral histories from people who used to work in the courts until 1992, again in the locations the material relates to for example reporters talk about carving their names into the press bench and former police officers talk about the noise and activity in the cells beneath the courts. Oral histories were recorded “in situ” which helped with recall and ensured content was linked to location.
This tour enables visitors to roam the court rooms freely until an ibeacon triggers content on their mobile device. Audio instruction is minimal.
One of the things that was really lacking at Leicester Castle Great Hall was a family offer.
The family trail invited young visitors with their carers to explore the court rooms to discover points of interest in order to unlock historical content.
The approach adopted was a task and reward model, like a treasure hunt. Once the location had been found, the iBeacon would trigger historical content and then a “reward” which might include a matching game, maze, or interactive.
The Locly platform has lots of widgets which were ideal for this purpose. Here two girls can be seen removing a car park surface to reveal King Richard´s remains. All “rewards” relate to the historical content.
We also created two interactive guidebooks which explained the historical context to the Castle and pointed out features of architectural interest. Information was layered so visitors could discover as much, or as little, about the castle as they wanted. Audio clips were embedded of historians pointing out features like Norman windows or the Georgian brick front to the medieval timbered hall, again recorded in situ.
Locly widgets were also included such as this picture swipe interactive which helped visitors visualize what the Great Hall might have looked like in medieval times compared to the same location today.
Originally the intention was just to provide historical information about the Great Hall using iBeacons but this didn´t really exploit their technological potential. Much of the historical information was general and not location specific. The beacons just trigger the guidebooks as visitors enter the courtrooms. We found the other trails really made far better use of this proximity based technology.
We used a development and evaluation framework that focused our effort on the visitor experience, particularly how the introduction of the app impacts visitor perceptions of learning and enjoyment, and of the Castle more generally as an environment for learning. And also how it impacts visitors’ use and engagement with the space in terms of dwell time (how long they stay), and how they navigate the space, where they stop, in what sequence, etc.
We trialled the app at various stages of development. The findings we are presenting today come from the trial of the final version of the app over July and August 2015, with 113 visitors. We used observation, pre and post-visit questionnaires, and app logs to collect data from visitors. And we were able to compare this data with data collected from 70 visitors who had visited the Castle before the introduction of the app. This is what we’re finding about the impact of the app on the visitor experience:
We used a 5-point Likert scale to measure visitors’ perceptions of learning. The graph at the bottom left illustrates that visitor perceptions of learning move up the scale when they use the app, as a much higher proportion of app users say that they learned a great deal or many things, compared with non-users. We run a two independent samples z-test, which confirmed that there is much less than half percent chance that this observation is by chance. So we are quite confident that the app is positively affecting visitor perceptions of learning.
Findings for perceptions of enjoyment are similar. Note that here we had an even harder job, as the vast majority of visitors were already reporting that they had a good time. With the app however, the vast majority is now reporting an excellent time. And again, we have confirmation that this difference is statistically significant.
Looking at visitor perceptions of the Castle as a learning environment and how they rate available information, activities, and learning opportunities: the app is having a positive impact on all three, with more spectacular effects on ratings of available activities and learning opportunities – as mentioned earlier, there was little available for visitors to do and learn from before the app.
The app has also had an overall positive impact on dwell time: visitors who used the app stayed on the site much longer. The difference is striking for lone visitors, who stayed twice as long with the app as they did without the app.
As explained earlier, not all tours on the app made full use of the beacons. And what I have presented so far is the impact of the app overall. But how do beacon-based tours compare with non-beacon tours? As you can see, app users rated the three beacon tours higher than the non-beacon tours: the Green Bicycle came top, followed by the Family Trail, followed by the Court Audio. The two more traditional interactive guide tours, the Historical Timeline and Architecture Trail, got the lowest ratings.
But what happens when visitors do beacon-based tours only, or non-beacon tours only?
This is what happens. Here we have segmented the app users into three groups. The beacon group did any combination of the Green Bicycle, the Court Audio and Family Trail; the non-beacon group did any combination of the Historical timeline and Architecture Trail, and the mixed group did any combination of all five tours. Both beacon and non-beacon groups did an average of 1.3 tours, while the mixed group did an average of 3 tours.
What we’re seeing here is the beacon group reporting higher levels of learning and much higher levels of enjoyment than the non-beacon group. Also, the beacon group stayed on average almost 50% longer than the non-beacon group.
Interestingly the mixed group has outperformed both the beacon and the non-beacon groups in terms of learning, but sits somewhere in the middle in terms of enjoyment.
This however should be expected: each of the five tours tells a different Castle story, presents a different part of its history. You will find the odd cross-reference, but there is no content overlap. So the more tours you do the more content you are exposed to, and so all tours have a cumulative effect on learning: the more tours you do, the more you learn.
With enjoyment it seems that things are different however, as adding non-beacon tours to the mix seems to be taking away from visitor enjoyment.
We also looked at how visitors move around the space. We observed visitors who had not used the app and found out where in each courtroom they stop for more than a few seconds, in what order they stop at these apparent points of interest, at how many points they stop in each room, etc. Such information can be valuable in making decisions on where to place visitors and how to use the beacon app to manage traffic on the site.
We wanted to compare this data with data from app logs.
And we still do, and although we’re at the moment having some difficulties, we’ve certainly not given up! :)
I will close the findings part of the talk with a couple more general findings.
The two samples, app users and non-users, were demographically very similar. The main difference we found between the two is in their motives for visiting, as a considerably higher proportion of app users cited social reasons for visiting – for example, to spend a day out with friends and family. This suggests that visitors with a more socially-oriented visit agenda, were more likely to opt in for the app trial. In fact, socially-oriented visitors agree or strongly agree in much higher proportions that they are likely to use mobile interpretation on a future heritage visit. This is important because we might design with learning-oriented visitors in mind, but it turns out that actually it is the socially-oriented visitors who are more likely to use it.
Interestingly though, when we look at how learning-oriented and socially-oriented visitors benefit from using the app, it turns out that the learning-oriented visitors benefit more, both in terms of learning and in terms of enjoyment. This is also important: learning-oriented visitors must be made aware that picking up a mobile device and using a heritage app will actually benefit their learning agenda.
The second finding relates to visitor confidence in using mobile devices and their willingness to use them in a heritage site for accessing historical content. We are discovering that the two, confidence and willingness, do not necessarily go together. Let me explain:
The graph at the top shows responses from visitors to other heritage sites in Leicester, who had not used an app. Younger audiences were, expectedly, more confident mobile users than older audiences – you can see the blue bars following a downward trend. However, that confidence does not translate to willingness to use a mobile device during a heritage visit. In fact, willingness to use seems to peak for the 35-55 age group. This tells us two very important things:
One is that there is a lot of convincing we have to do in order to get younger audiences to use apps in museums and heritage sites.
The second is that there is a lot of supporting we must be prepared to do in order to get older audiences to use apps in museums and heritage sites.
The graph at the bottom shows confidence and willingness for app users at the Castle. Note that participants answered these questions after they had used the app. Although the two samples are not directly comparable, when combined they do give us indications that (a) visitors feel more confident about using an app once they have tried it; and (b) the use of an app at a heritage site is more appealing for both younger, under 26 and older, 56-75 audiences, once they have tried it. So the third lesson here I guess is, by offering easy to use, enjoyable mobile experiences, we are building up visitors’ confidence and appetite for more mobile interpretation.
In summary, what we have learned:
Beacon-based interpretation is beneficial for learning and enjoyment, and increases positive perception of the site as learning environment
Mixing beacon with non-beacon mobile interpretation is ok for learning, but reduces enjoyment
Beacon logs have huge potential to help us understand the impact of mobile interpretation on visitors’ use of space. I truly hope we will manage to either make the data we have usable, or collect more data in future projects for this. If anyone out there has something to share I’ll be keen to hear from you.
We design for learning-oriented visitors and indeed it is them who benefit most. But it is the socially-oriented visitors who are more keen app adopters. So we must rethink our approach.
Mobile confidence does not translate necessarily to willingness to use mobiles in a heritage setting. So maybe we should not assume that younger, more tech savvy audiences will come running when they see an app.
But equally importantly, mobile confidence and willingness to use increase with good experiences. Easy to use, engaging apps can change attitudes to technology and boost confidence.
Demonstration of the locly platform.
For more demos and training videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/thelocly
