Prototyping AR in a University Museum: How User Tests Informed an Accessibility Plan Including and Beyond the Museum. Talk by Max Evjen at MuseWeb, Boston, MA., April 5th, 2019.
Enhancing Worker Digital Experience: A Hands-on Workshop for Partners
Prototyping AR in a University Museum: How User Tests Informed an Accessibility Plan Including and Beyond the Museum
1. Prototyping AR in a University Museum:
How User Tests Informed an Accessibility Plan
Including and Beyond the Museum
Max Evjen (@cantus94) #MW19-ExpExp
4. Evaluation Plan
• Institutional Goals
• Update long term exhibitions by augmentation rather than replacement
• Engage MSU Students particularly, in addition to other visitors
• Visitor Experience Goals
• Encourage close looking at the Wetlands Mural in the Hall of Animal Diversity
• Encourage visitor learning about animal adaptation and behavior in the context of
diverse ecosystems
• Encourage surprise and wonder about the experience
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5. Evaluation Questions
1. How much time do visitors spend at the mural during the AR experience?
2. Do visitors engage in close looking with the mural during the AR
experience?
3. Do visitors learn anything about animal behavior and/or adaptation?
4. Are visitors delighted while using the AR program?
5. Who uses the program?
6. What other outcomes do visitors report?
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7. User Tests
• Data Collection: Max Evjen, Sean McKeon,
Christian Perry
• Analysis Team: Max Evjen, Rachel Allen,
Alyssa Franks, Shelby Merlino, Christian
Perry, Jake Roberts
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8. Summary of Primary Findings
• 56% of participants were MSU Students.
• 60.6% of respondents to questionnaire indicated learning about animal adaptation and/or
behavior.
• 19.6% recommended in questionnaires, and 3.8% recommended in behavior observations
(unprompted) that the Museum should extend the experience throughout the galleries.
• Slow looking: (average duration 1:40; as much as 6:04), 4.5% of respondents to
questionnaires responded that it encouraged slow looking.
• 39.3% in questionnaires indicated surprise/wonder, and 50% indicated fun/excitement.
• In behavior observations: 50.7% discussed with others, and 43.2% called others over to see
something. A personal device provides a social experience.
@cantus94 #MW19-ExpExp
10. Primary Findings (Questionnaires)
• Zip Codes
• 58 were from Michigan
• 17 from East Lansing
• 12 from Lansing
• Other remaining 8 from PA, OH, IN, IL, TX, and CA.
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11. Primary Findings (Questionnaires)
• When asked if users learned anything:
• 60.6% said they learned about animal adaptation and/or behavior
• 12.1% indicated they did not learn anything
• When asked how experience made users feel:
• 50% indicated fun and/or excitement
• 39.3% indicated surprise and/or wonder
• 4.5% indicated it encouraged slow looking
@cantus94 #MW19-ExpExp
12. Primary Findings (Questionnaires)
• When asked if anything surprised users about the experience:
• 51% indicated animals were surprising
• 4.5% indicated text was surprising
• 16.6% indicated aspects of the experience as a whole were surprising
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13. Primary Findings (Questionnaires)
• When asked if there was anything else users wished they could do with the
program:
• 21.2% indicated they wished for interactivity in the program
• 19.6% indicated they wanted the experience throughout the Museum
• 15.1% made recommendations about the animals
• 12% made recommendations about the overall experience
• 6% made recommendations about the hardware
• 4.5% made recommendations about the text
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15. Primary Findings (Behavior Sampling)
• Duration of use:
• Average use: 1 min 40 seconds
• Median use: 1 min 10 seconds
• Range: (20 seconds : 6 minutes 4 seconds)
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16. Primary Findings (Behavior Sampling)
• User Behaviors:
• Users expressed delight through facial or verbal expressions: 60.5%
• Users discussed the AR program with others in their group: 50.7%
• Users called others over to view something: 43.2%
• Users asked about more functionality in the program (sound or movement):
4.9%
• Users related the content of the AR to past experiences: 4.9%
• Users asked about more AR throughout the Museum: 3.8% (unprompted)
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17. Recommendations
• Extend the program throughout the long-term galleries
• Add additional interactivity in the program
• Establish separate learning goals for each gallery
• Make the program a constituent part of an accessibility plan
• Explore iBeacons as a possible solution
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18. Future of the Project
• Conversations with Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities
• Adherence to strategy
• Diversity, Equity, Accessibility & Inclusion (DEAI) Plan
• Constituent part of app developed with Beacons?
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19. Very Special Thanks!
• Teresa Goforth, Denice Blair
• Kate Sonka, Eric Martin
• Terence O’Neil, Rachel Allen, Alyssa Franks, Shelby Merlino, Christian
Perry, and Jacob Roberts
Hello, I’m Max Evjen from the Michigan State University Museum, and I’ll be talking about Prototyping AR in a University Museum: How User Tests Informed and Accessibility Plan Including and Beyond the Museum. Museum staff had been discussing AR as a solution for updating long term galleries without the expense of ripping them out and building new ones (this was also a goal in the AR project at National Museums Wales presentation yesterday).
While the Museum is currently severely underresourced for new digital projects, some money that was previously set aside for an older technical solution was redirected so we could spend some money on devices, and possibly hire a student who we found out had experience working in AR in museum settings. The student was actually hired by the College of Arts & Letters specifically to work with us for a semester and summer developing this experience. We decided we would start this project in the Hall of Animal Diversity, a gallery in the Museum that holds groupings of taxidermies animals arranged by theme in cases, a brown bear (who we put on Twitter as our Museum Mascot @MSUMuseumBear), a few activities, some videos of animals making sounds, and a Michigan Wetland Mural, where- multiple museum staff indicated anecdotally - nobody ever stops to look. This made it a prime testing ground for an AR pilot project.
We purchased 4 Samsung Nexus 10 tablets, because the programmer had experience working in the android environment using Vuforia and Unity3D. We initially wanted a variety of animals moving and possibly some additional interpretation that would pup up when animals were selected. But that level of interactivity was not something the programmer could accomplish, and since we had only the programmer working on the project, and no graphic designer, we were constrained by being able to only select what animals were on offer in the Unity 3D Asset Store. So we ended up with some vegetation and some animals with some limited movement, some interpretations including open ended questions with the AR animals, and some interpretations with animals already featured in the Mural.
In establishing user tests we established the following goals:
To address those goals we drafted the following evaluation questions
We decided to use post experience questionnaires, and behavior sampling through video observation. We set a target n=100, but once we got 66 questionnaires and 81 video observations we decided it was time to stop collection and start analyzing the data.
Before I go any further I need to sop to acknowledge the otherwise invisible labor of extremely dedicated students who joined me for the data collection and analysis. We entered the survey data into a google sheet where we tabulated the quantitative data, and coded the qualitative data. For the behavior observations, we designed the codebook through inductive analysis by watching all the videos and writing down on post it notes what we saw and heard, then grouped those responses into themes, and put those themes into the codebook - then turned into questions in a google form for data entry.
More recent conversations between the MSU Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities (RCPD) and the museum during the user tests were eventually centered on the possibility of using AR as a constituent part of an overall accessibility plan that the museum had yet to create and implement. Michigan State University, broadly, is in the middle of a five-year accessibility plan, but that plan only applied to academic units, not areas like the museum. The museum is now working toward developing a DEAI plan, since once we started talking about accessibility we found we couldn’t do that without talking about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The museum intends to create additional AR experiences throughout the museum as a means of making the museum more accessible and inclusive, since AR has been shown to successfully address accessibility, including offering experiences for individuals with low- or no vision (Coughlin & Miele, 2017), or individuals with mobility challenges (Tecla Blog, 2018).
During these conversations, we found that RCPD has been working with a PhD student, who has experience developing AR with iBeacons; they have indicated that there may be interest in coordinating an AR program with other areas of the campus, including possibly the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (the campus contemporary art museum), and other individuals within the College of Arts and Letters, who have been brainstorming about the use of AR and iBeacons throughout the campus. In fact I met with them last week, and they had already created an app for the MSU Museum, unbeknownst to me, that AR may be a constituent part. These partnerships, and thoughts about exactly how the accessibility plan will dictate how we will create AR experiences throughout the museum to address accessibility issues, are emergent (for instance, the app is built as a BYOD model, while our AR pilot was purposefully built to NOT be BYOD). But the opportunity to continue working with individuals across MSU’s campus shows great benefits: communication across a campus as large as MSU has been key to avoiding duplicative work, and the ability to pool our resources means working toward successful projects that we could not accomplish with our own limited resources.