I had mixed feelings about the article—I mostly agree that these apps all leave much to be desired, but I disagree that we shouldn’t be trying. Experimentation without perfection is a good thing.  You may remember, I have my own issues with the use of technology in museums, had a less than stellar experience using the AMNH Explorer app and we’ve had to rework our own mobile app once already.  Now is a good time to look at what the author is saying and discuss the current state of our mobile application.

One of the things Rothstein brings up is the lack of geolocation in our app.  He wants the device to automatically locate where he’s standing and magically deliver content—don’t we all?  We have GPS and AMNH’s Explorer app to thank for setting the bar so high, but in terms of what we can do here in Brooklyn, it’s just not possible yet.  While we do have a museum-wide wireless system, it was put in during 2004 and we don’t have the meshing technology required to triangulate signal (something that would require replacing the existing wireless network in its entirety), so we rely on people’s use of accession numbers to look up information about objects.  This is not perfect by any means, but it’s the simplest, clearest and most sustainable way we’ve come up with to deal with the nearly 6000 objects on view.  We tried other methods in version 1 of our app to no avail and we’ve considered switching to QR codes or short numeric codes, but that’s not realistic for this many objects.  Given every object has a unique number published on the object label and we need to develop a system that works with every object on view, accession number lookup is the way to do it…at least for now.

Rothstein makes an assumption about low usage of our app and this is true in some ways, but not true in others.  First and foremost, we don’t have a large audience for our app.  In the galleries on any given day (especially Target First Saturday), you’ll see very few visitors pulling out smartphones.  Eventually, that will change and it’s important to have a system in place as we start to see this turn around, but for now we are consistently seeing clamshell phones on cheaper monthly plans.  Beyond this, our app has suffered from poor visibility throughout the building.  I will admit that I’m really jealous of the amount of visibility the AMNH app—big signage everywhere, staff have Explorer t-shirts and ads are seemingly all over the place—as simply as I can put this:  I want.

Just recently, we managed to get directory signage better positioned and our designers are helping us by including a picture of the iphone.  We saw a slight rise in usage when the signage went in, so that’s helping a bit.

So, let’s take a look at what’s really happening when people use this.  The statistics are indicating that they are doing so for pre-visit information (directions, hours, exhibitions, calendar) and that’s something that closely mirrors our general website traffic patterns.  It’s not that visitors are trying to use BklynMuse (our collection search) and failing or trying to play Gallery Tag! (our gallery game) and giving up—they are not getting that far. This could indicate two things:  1)  that visitors want to use the application pre-visit, but they don’t want it to be part of their in-gallery experience  and/or 2)  our app’s home screen is not clear enough to explain all the choices available. For our next round of changes, we are going to concentrate on the latter and see if that changes the metrics.

What in the world do I get behind doors labeled BklynMuse and Gallery Tag?  It’s just not clear.

Where Rothstein’s assumption falls really short is what happens when people use BklynMuse.  What we are seeing in the statistics indicates that when people are using it, they are using it in an interactive way.  When you compare visitor’s use of the “Like This” feature in-gallery to the collection online, what you see is that on the whole, people in the gallery are using this feature to recommend objects to other visitors.  So, in theory, this kind of recommendation layer where we directly ask people to help guide others is working—we just need to do a better job getting people to the feature.

Low usage overall? Yes, but “Like this” feature is being utilized in the gallery more than on our website.

Rothstein goes on at length to talk about why none of these apps measure up to the experience he wants in the gallery and there’s a point to that.  Each and every visitor walking in our doors is likely to expect something different from an app and every visitor is going to respond differently to what we provide. My point is that it is our  responsibility, collectively, to try new approaches and provide as many entry points into content and the museum as possible.   In terms of Brooklyn’s people-focused mission, we believe a people-focused application is the way to go.  The curated content is already on the walls in the form of object installation, labels and didactics, in-gallery multimedia and gallery design.  The power of the device means we can provide something else, something more unique. We believe leveraging the power of our visitor’s voices  in combination with our own is a worthy goal.  Are we there yet?  No.  Should we try, discuss, learn from our visitors and continue to iterate?  Yes, yes, yes.

I’d love to discuss more via the comments.  There’s a lot to cover on this subject, that’s for sure.

Let’s look at our overall strategy for a moment.  Given the museum’s community-minded mission, we aim to spend our time developing content in a sustainable and accessible manner.  This means closely adhering to web standards and writing code and designing interfaces that play nicely across all platforms.  So, the first iteration of our Mobile Web launch was simple—hit www.brooklynmuseum.org on a mobile device and get redirected to a version of the site that renders well on (many) small screens.  Rather than create an app, we followed our strategy and developed so we didn’t need one, but everything can change quickly when you put people in the mix…

In order to launch our mobile site, I hosted a mobile meetup at Target First Saturday.  The purpose of the meetup was to get visitors started using Gallery Tag! and gain some feedback on the new game, but I was stunned at what happened as I met with folks.  Nine times out of ten, the owners of the devices had confused looks when I said, “open your web browser and go to www.brooklynmuseum.org.” I was floored at how much confusion was created just simply getting people to open their mobile browser.  Once we’d get through that, the idea of bookmarking it to the home screen was even more foreign.  At almost every turn, visitors were expecting an app.  Seeing these exchanges, I started to think about accessibility again. Of course, there’s the nuts and bolts web accessibility approach that we’ve been very committed to, but there are also accessibility issues around natural usage behavior.  In this case, it was clear to me that people on app phones wanted apps, not necessarily mobile websites and by not giving them an app, we were actually making it more difficult for them to find our content.

And, here we are.  We hired Dave Wilkinson to build apps for iPhone and Droid.  If you don’t know Dave, we knew him from his work on the Indicommons app and, besides that, he’s Flickr famous.  The apps are designed to simply wrap our existing mobile web site, which makes the endeavor sustainable for us.  We can continue to add content to the mobile site, but the apps themselves can stay static and this means we can avoid future development costs.  While we are not expecting downloads by the gazillons, we are hoping that this makes our mobile content accessible via as many avenues as possible.

Let’s recap.

BklynMuse is a gallery guide for web-enabled smart phones (iphone, droid, blackberry).  At its heart, it’s a recommendation system powered by people—as you use it and actively “like” objects in our galleries, the guide will show you recommendations based on those preferences.  If you are scratching your head at this point, go back and re-read the primer from the August ’09 launch.

Location, location, location.

This is, by far, the biggest fail and still remains the biggest challenge ahead of us.  In our version 1 beta testing, 10/10 testers expected the device to automatically locate them within the gallery and were frustrated when it didn’t.  The reality is, that technology is just not there yet once you get inside the building.   Geolocation works really well in the wild, but it fails in galleries where cell signal is spotty and object location mapping is complicated. In addition, our use of cell-phone repeaters to extend signal within our walls does nothing but make an even bigger mess of the issue.

Signage #fail.  Signage was too small and got lost in a sea of sameness trying to blend in.

In version 1, we assigned room codes to each area of the museum, but ran into major problems when the signs were too small and blended in too much to the surroundings.  With so many signs going into the building, the general concern was that it would be overwhelming for people who wouldn’t want to use the system, so the choice was made to try and make this signage blend in.  Of course, that meant it was difficult for those using the system to find the signs, so we had a Catch-22 going on.

In version 1, above, visitors had trouble with drop down menus as a way to set location.

When folks did find the signs, they found the drop down menus difficult to use.  We thought about using QR codes or similar, but as an institution with a community-minded mission, we want the guide to remain as accessible as possible and that means striving to ensure it works across many devices.  What we give up in a scenario like this is the ability to use built-in hardware easily.  Not to mention, putting QR codes on the 5,764 objects on view would be just a tad distracting. We thought about maps, but maps present a problem on a small screen (doable, but tough) and, most importantly, for every person who understands a floor plan there’s another who can’t stand them.  Maps might solve the problem for some people, but they could easily create frustration for another set of users.

In version 2, above, we focus on accession number searching.  If people have trouble, we’ve got an example to explain what to look for on a label.

In the end, we simplified in version 2.  Room codes are gone and we’ve re-engineered the home page to focus on accession number searching and we’ve added some education about what we mean by accession number (because, that’s obvious to everyone…right?).

Congrats, you found the Bird Lady!  Now, view the objects in this room.

When you find the object you are looking for, that automatically sets your location, so you can browse other things in the room.  This seems like a surprisingly simple solution to a complex problem, but perhaps that’s too easy?  I guess we are about to find out.

Digging for gold.

Overwhelmingly, beta testers told us two things.  They loved finding the “notes,” off-the-cuff remarks from staffers and visitors about the objects, but as much as they loved the notes, they were too difficult to find.  In version 1, you had to click on an object to see if there was content there that might interest you.  In version 2, we’ve re-engineered the recommended tab to indicate what kind of content is behind the click.

(left) Version 1:  Difficult to see what kind of content is available.  (right) Version 2:  Adjusted this view to include what comes after the click.

Too much.

You may be spotting a trend right about now: simplification.  Version 1 of this guide wanted to be everything to all users all of the time and it was a mess!  That’s my fault for growing the spec and getting too excited in the first phase, so now we are cleaning up after a few hand slaps later.  Moods are gone.  Sets have been simplified and combined into comments.  Settings have been paired down to a minimum. We took a weed whacker to the guide in the name of less is more.  While we are not at a Miesian level yet, we’ve come far in version 2 and may go one more round in our next iteration as we see how visitors use the device.

Difficult to let go of this, but it proved to be just too much and we needed to simplify.  Moods, seen in version 1 above, are now gone.

Have a say.

Beta testers also told us that the “notes” inspired them to want to comment too, right there in the gallery without having to go back to the website, so we are now allowing comments on each of the object pages.  This could be a total disaster—keyboards on small devices are tough and that may cause a lot of frustration.  We are worried about the usual issues with moderation and possible jump in inquires, but it’s worth a shot.  The electronic comment books teach us a lot about our exhibitions and installations—enabling something similar on an object level may yield interesting results.  Either that or it will be the first thing we take away in version 3!

Let’s talk style.

We’ve restyled much of the UX, so that it has more iphone-like elements.  Version 1 was styled much more like our website and that just didn’t work.   Overall, elements have a much more clickable feel to them…including the “like” button, which is something we really want to see people using.  (Tip of the hat to Seb Chan, for stating the obvious about this over dinner one evening in NZ—thanks, Seb!)

We have no idea if any of these changes will help, but the aim was to make a fast set of adjustments, get it into the hands of visitors and then make more changes based on what we see happen.

If you made it this far, stay tuned. I’ll be back tomorrow with more news.  Curious?  Here’s a hint.

Today, we are launching BklynMuse, a gallery guide that is designed to complement the more structured museum experience.  In its most basic form, it’s a community-powered recommendation system for the objects that are on display here.  As visitors move through the galleries, they can recommend objects to other visitors.  Based on the  recommendations you give it, this muse will crunch the collective data and present other suggestions for you as you move from room to room.  The guide does other stuff too—it gives access to our cell-phone audio stops, our YouTube videos—but the real power in the device comes from visitors sharing their own takes in our galleries.

This is one of a series of things we are implementing to bridge both the online experience with the in-person visit.  In the case of BklynMuse, Posse members get their recommendations saved to their profiles for future reference—think of it as bookmarking your favs on the go in the gallery and then being able to access them later.  Even more than that, Posse members can create sets of objects on our website and annotate them and, if you choose to sign into your Posse account on BklynMuse, your sets will be right there waiting for you to follow in the gallery.  Those same sets can be shared and featured for other visitors to see, so your voice…your notes…your selections…may be highlighted, in all their Posse glory, for all to see.

For those of you reading the blog, you know I’ve been on a bit of a failure kick lately—cautious observations of visitors glued to screens and kiosks that drive me slightly bonkers—you may be wondering how this could possibly be different.   We designed this interface as more like a scavenger hunt than a multimedia guide.  It’s something that can guide you to objects and something you can use to help guide others, but it’s not meant to replicate the actual experience of really looking at the work, so I’m hoping this reduces the screen glue. As with everything, only time will really tell the outcome, but it’s worth a try.

In areas like The Dinner Party and Luce Visible Storage, suddenly you have a whole kiosk’s worth of information at your fingertips…right there in the space when you need, it in an unobtrusive way.

There’s even more after the jump if you are curious.

Logistics:

Why a web app?  We wanted to develop something that could be utilized on as many devices as possible.  Now, that means we can’t do some fancy bells and whistles…like integration with iPhone cams, etc., but we believe accessibility is paramount.

Why room codes?  We went with short codes instead of something like QR codes because I pine for the day that QR codes become truly easy to use.  Different cell phone cameras trying to capture QR codes in low light = one heck of a mess.  We are going for the most universal method, the simplest way to get visitors the information.

What’s to prevent a cascade? We’ve got lots of Wisdom of Crowds randomization built into the output to avoid it.

Why can’t I comment on objects and create sets on the fly during my visit?  That may be coming in version 2, but for now we wanted to be conscious that typing on these little device keyboards can be a frustrating and painful experience.  As it stands, the interface is almost all touch-and-go with as little typing needed as possible and the expectation is this will lowers the barrier to entry and allows the app to be more easily used.

Considerations:

At the moment, we are relying on visitors to bring their own hardware and we don’t how many of our visitors have these devices or want an experience like this. We will be watching usage closely, but also will be monitoring how many visitors come to the front desk to ask if we have units available.   For now, this is a starting point and as we learn more we will be considering if checkout at the front desk is necessary option that we need to provide.

What’s Next:

Eventually, the data gathered will power a recommendation system on our website.  This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but hesitated because objects present themselves so differently via the web.  We are hoping that data gathered in the gallery will be more true to the objects, so when we port this back to the website, the recommendations will be based on what visitors physically saw in the gallery rather than how objects are (mis)interpreted via the web.

As many readers know, we have an existing iPhone app that was developed using our API, so you might be wondering how these two things will co-exist.  Well, we think BklynMuse is something that works well in the building—everything is location specific, recommendations are something you give in the gallery while looking at objects.  The iPhone app works well outside of the building as a browser for our collection. Because the iPhone app is now open source, our internal team will be working to contribute code to combine the two things in the Fall. Ideally, when you download the iPhone app in the future, the home screen will present you with two choices “I’m in the building and want to explore.” or “I want to browse the collection away from the museum.” Based on the adventure you choose, the app will either bounce you to BklynMuse or you will be directed to the existing iPhone app.

Thank You:

For the first time since Click!, we did some extensive beta testing with some pretty amazing people willing to give their time to this project and this testing was essential.  We not only learned a lot from it, but it sparked some great ideas along the way and we wouldn’t be at this juncture without the help and dedication of: Mike, Rik, Lisa, Erin, MuseumNerd, Wesley, Mike, Matt & Kendall, Amy, Stephen, Ronnye & Fred, Farrah, Amy, Dave and Courtney.  Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to make this app even better.

If you got this far, you must want to give it a go?

We did extensive testing with mobile device browsers, but didn’t bother with desktop browsers, so you’ll have to humor us and use Firefox if you are testing via desktop instead of a mobile device.  Point your browser to m.brooklynmuseum.org and scale it down so the window is small.  If you need room codes you can find them on my Flickr (the codes are on labels in each gallery, I’m just giving you maps to be friendly).  If you are on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you can add the app to the homescreen after you hit it in mobile Safari.  Don’t forget to set your mood and have some fun!