Editor's Notes

• Hello. My name is Ana, I am cofounder of Unique Visitors.
  
  I’m Conxa Rodà, from the MNAC in Barcelona.
  We think the Museum as a Connector. We museems need to facilitate visitors making meaningful connections with our collections, offering as many diverse content and platforms as we can to engage them.
  
  How it all began?
  One day this young woman, Ana Basso, came to my office with what, from the very beginning, we perceived was a great idea for a new mobile project .
  Together with her partner Felipe, a developer and graphic designer, they planned to build an app that offered a double way of approaching the museum collections: it would offer the “official” itineraries prepared by the museum but the singularity was that it would also offer visitors the possibility to create their own routes selecting works from the online collection.
  To put the project into reality they needed a museum to provide them with the collection data and images. So we did.
   
  At my museum, we are very tight budgeted. BUT, we have a treasure: our COLLECTION. And what do IT companies need when building new IT services? CONTENT. So it was a perfect match.
  
• To give you a sense of what this project is about, we are going to start with a video.
  On this video, our users explain how the platform works.
  So let’s go ahead and watch it!
• As you can see, the focus of this platform is to help visitors to have a better experience in a museum. As I am sure everyone here knows it, this is not a new problem.
  
  It’s overwhelming for the visitor to know what to see.
  
  If we try to see everything,
• It’s just exhausting.
  
  We need to narrow it down. But if no one prepares in advance, how can they choose what to see?
• I love this picture because it talks about two important concepts: storytelling and sharing. It’s about interaction of two peers, information that is shared and not by the museum staff.
  People want meaningful experiences, someone to guide them and tell great stories about what they are seeing.
  
  And at the same time, people also feel the need to share their knowledge, their feelings and thoughts. We are not passive consumers any more, we take ownership of our experiences.
• That is why museums can’t continue only offering the same audio tour to everyone.
  
  In the era of personalization, one size does not fit all.
  
  We are different people and we want different things.
• So why not use crowdsourcing to tackle this issue?
• Museum lovers are a community eager to share. And that is a huge asset that is commonly overlooked by organizations.
  When we allow people to create content, they engage with the museum on a deeper level. When people live the experience of being a museum curator, taking ownership over the collection, they feel invested to share and to talk about the museum with their friends.
  And that is what we want, peer recommendations, peer dialogue. To see the museum through the eyes of other visitors. All those are great concepts, but how can we make this work?
• So this was our process.
  We knew from the beginning it would be an online project
• We wanted to build a platform where people could create tours and make recommendations to others about which artworks to see.
  
  And it should work for any museum.
• We proposed a collaboration to the National Museum.
  
  It was the best museum to work with, for several reasons:
  
  First of all, it has Conxa Rodà. Conxa is known for being forward thinking and to advocate for collaborations, and having someone like her on board was really important for the project.
• But also, this is an ideal collection: it’s the largest art collection in Barcelona.That’s almost 2000 exhibits.
  - The collection data is organized and multilingual.
  This set of requirements covers most of the challenges we would later face with other museums.
  - Having the museum on board was also important because the museum itself was a place of experimentation, where we could conduct tests.
  - The museum also helps with the dissemination.
  And provided feedback to validate if what we do is actually useful
• I’ll talk a little bit about our approach to to this project
  We all know software development is expensive.
  Se we can’t invest in one idea only to find out it was not well thought through in the end of the process, when we launch.
  Being a participatory project, that is a big risk.
• So to minimize the risk, we used of a combination of different methodologies:
  Design thinking: user centered approach, workshops, contact with your audience.
  Agile: short development sprints, story oriented (instead of task oriented)
  Fast prototyping: we prototype anything, from product development to marketing campains
  Most important: lean software development. That means frequent releases and evaluation of results.
• Lean mean following this mantra: Build–Measure–Learn (and Iterate). That is called the feedback loop.
• So we had previous iterations before we build the release version. I’m going to show you what we did.
  Our first iteration was a very simple mobile app. We wanted to check if this idea was well received by users and also by the museums.
  As you can see, users could complete the full cycle. They could view tours created by others and also create their own tours.
• We wanted to confirm the product was interesting and it did pass the test.
  We interviewed users to ask what they thought. The overall feedback was positive but we learned valuable insights.
  We learned people don’t like writing on their mobile phones, and to produce high quality content, they prefer their computers.
  We also had insights on specific features, you can go through them on our paper.
• The next iteration was about testing if people would create better quality content using a computer instead of their phones.
  
  We didn't build anything to test it.
  
  We used a Tumblr website and all contributions were received using Google Forms.
• We were really surprised by the quality and creativity of the tours submitted!
  This tour, for instance, is about dogs in the collection. The National Museum has a big collection that goes from the 11th century to the 20th century. But instead of talking about the evolution of styles, this user decided to talk about the evolution of the relationship humans have with dogs, since medieval age to modern times.
  That is a really interesting view of the collection! So with the prototype we learned there is a lot of potential in letting people create their own content.
  But the downside was that is was very difficult to make them create tours. They needed to research the artworks, search for the pictures and what to write about them, and it just seemed like too much work.
• With all this information we were ready to design and develop our release version.
  We now knew what was important.
  It needed to be multiplatform, so it should work seamlessly on mobile and on a computer.
  And also, we knew that our goal was to make it extremely easy for anyone to feel comfortable of creating their own tour, without the need to research.
• For this to happen, we used the museum database.
  That way, people could just easily search for the artworks they wanted to add to their tours.
• When you choose an artwork, you get to see all the metadata: the picture, it’s title, author, and even a description when available.
  
  That way, people don’t need to research or write anything, but they can if they want to.
• All the content created on the web is automatically available on the mobile app, so other people can follow it on their phones.
• We successfully made it easier for anyone to create tours. But the question is: is that enough?
• We found that dissemination is crucial, and the museum plays a key role when it comes to reaching the target audience.
• We promote the platform in different channels, both inside the museum and online.
  The strategies that worked the most would be:
• The physical display on the museum entrance works great for app downloads.
• To reach content creators, the museum online channels work the best: so, the museum website, museum blog and social networks
• The best campaign for tour creation: a contest where we awarded the best tours.
  I’ll tell you more about this contest: we’ve learned that what worked the best for user generated content was to give incentives.
  Incentives can be very inexpensive for the museum, but they mean a lot for the user.
  An example is the organization’s recognition - if the museum tweets or shares a user’s tour, that’s very exciting for them.
  We also gave away prizes: museum catalogues or free memberships, and it was a huge success.
• We awarded the most popular tour as well, and that motivated people to share more.
  We can see here how effective peer sharing is: when this particular user shared her tour on Facebook, we got a peek of access even higher that when the museum shares it.
  That’s because peer recomendation is more effective than an institutional tweet.
• And finally, about the content. In 6 weeks of the contest, users created tours using 428 different artworks. That represents a quarter of the museum exhibited collection.
  
  The conclusion here is that when we give users the freedom to chose, they go beyond the masterpieces.
• The museum evaluates the collaboration as successful. Some of the benefits of this project from the museum’s perspective are:
  ●   Offering users a new way to approach and enjoy the collection
  ●   User generated content: a large variety of tours based on different levels of expertise, taste and cultural background
  ●   Getting new insights of the audience via crowdsourced recommendations. People really help finding more and diverse connections among the artworks
  ●   increase engagement: encouraging new audiences to visit or get current visitors repeat visits for more tours
  ●   For users it means a positive, fun and enriching way of accessing the collections. Visitors were offered the view of other visitors as well, lowering the barrier to access knowledge that sometimes academic or expert information may create.
• So let’s summarize some of the takeaways
• Some common features I’ve detected of the new apps are
  imagination to detect niches of interest or users’ needs not covered
  to provide multiple ways of user participation
  to include personalised and relevant information for the public, which means that the more an app is used, the more accurate the recommendations it makes.
  simplification of the browsing, clearer designs
  All of these features are well covered by Unique Visitors
• So I would like to end this presentation with a request: in order to trully experience the platform, I invite you to create a tour for one of the museums currently available.
  We are looking forward to your questions. Thank you!