The Electronic Guidebook: Using Portable Devices And A Wireless Web-Based Network To Extend The Museum Experience
Findings
The “Electronic Guidebook” was a research project lasting from about 1999-2003 that investigated the use of handheld devices to support richer learning experiences for science museum visitors. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted in collaboration with HP Labs and the Concord Consortium. This paper in particular conducted the first part in a series of studies regarding the use of handheld devices to augment the museum visitors’ experience by providing them with a personalized and interactive “guide”. They were interested in uncovering potential issues and challenges regarding technology development for the hand-held devices, interface design both on the hardware and software levels, and the educational potential. The research team included museum educators, scientists, educational technology researchers, learning researchers, and human-computer interface researchers. The initial tests described in the paper followed 12 local school teachers, 14 adults, and 8 young people (10-17) as they used prototypes of these hand-held devices in science museums and interacted with exhibits. The researchers followed up each observation with semi-structured interviews. Their preliminary findings suggested that users reacted positively to the extra information and context provided by the devices, and the ability to bookmark information to look at later. The main negatives they found were that using the handheld while in the museum tended to distract people from playing with the exhibits themselves or interacting with others. They found that visitors preferred audio content to visual content. The findings here are definitely believable, and they involved interviews with a decent number of participants.
Relevance for our project
One of the most interesting aspects of this paper was that they continually compared the hand-held devices to paper travel guides. They suggested that these hand-helds would allow users to “personalize” their museum experience by being able to jot notes about different pieces and bookmark exhibits for referring back to later. This is similar to the “favoriting” option our app supports, but we did not include the possibility of users making private “notes” for themselves on art pieces. If we had more time, that would definitely be an interesting feature to add.
It was also interesting to read their concerns about the interaction of these devices and apps with the complex social activity of a museum visit; i.e. trying to integrate the use of these devices seamlessly into group settings without fragmenting the group. That’s certainly something that should be of concern for us, but we didn’t do enough during contextual inquiries and interviews to tease out how to best treat this potential problem.
The researchers also noted that they wanted to create resources that could stimulate exploration and reflection and function as more than just an electronic textbook. This concern is certainly very real for us too. The researchers combatted this with a design that was heavily focused on visual interaction (eg. buttons for navigating to context and more information were all pictures, as shown below). In addition, the design was very personalizable; the “bookmark” feature eventually fed into a “personalized web page” that users could visit from home. If we could start over, we could have put more emphasis on making the interaction style as visual as possible, so as to not bore the user.
Because this paper was published in the early 2000s, there are definitely some advancements in technology that allow our design to be a real improvement on this. Certainly hardware concerns such as ensuring that the wireless communication was effective and trying to motivate people to carry these devices in the first place have been overcome with time. In addition, I think that the discussion section that is a prominent feature of our app is a nice improvement on their design, and allows for a different and more relaxed kind of learning that certainly helps it feel less like an “electronic textbook.” In the end though, it was really cool to read a paper that was investigating very similar design ideas for enhancing the museum experience.
Citations
Article Referenced: Semper, Robert, and Mirjana Spasojevic. “The Electronic Guidebook: Using Portable Devices and a Wireless Web-Based Network to Extend the Museum Experience.” Archives & Museum Informatics, 1 Apr. 2002, eric.ed.gov/?id=ED482091.