A Privacy Story:
interactive museum experience

OPPORTUNITY

How can we use interactive technology to speculatively enhance the museum experience of the 'Digital Anxieties' display at the Victoria and Albert Museum?

SOLUTION

A do-it-yourself visualisation of the journey taken by our data.

Timeline
8 weeks

Group members
Caroline Partridge, Durva Ratnaparkhi, Gabriel Richardson

Role
User research, creative facilitation, document control

Project poster by Caro

Concept UI design (Yuki)

'A Privacy Story' is an interactive map describing the journey of different pieces of data that we knowingly or unknowingly give out.

Beginning with an input of data
Informing user on who collects the data
Reasons they want the data
What they can learn from it
What they use it for
Key players involved in data collection and privacy

Our goal was to create a transformational way for visitors to engage with the 'Digital Anxieties' display and to learn more about the story of data privacy and how it may affect them.

Our design provides a personalised link between each visitor to the overall theme of the objects in the display; everyone can see how data privacy comes up within their own life, regardless of whether they are familiar with the topic or considering it for the first time.

USER RESEARCH

Informed by a diverse mix of culture experts and real visitors

User research was conducted through a mix of natural observations at the site and interviews with 5 random museum visitors, 2 museum enthusiasts and 2 museum and culture experts.

As a group we came up with goals for our interviews and created detailed interview guides for semi-structured interviews.

I took on the role of lead user researcher during this part of the process. I planned to recruit and conduct visitor interviews around an event at the museum, as the activation nature of the event meant a much busier, more social museum crowd who would be more receptive to interviews.

design

Pre-prepared printed informed consent forms
5 visitors
10-15 minute voice-recorded interviews

questions

Who they were; what type of audience they were
What they usually sought out during a museum visit
Past memorable interaction experiences

data analysis
After Gab and Durva completed coded analysis of the interviews, we conducted an empathy map workshop with the identified themes and patterns online.

Interest in interactives that help them learn more about a piece
Agency bringing the potential for increased audience interaction and engagement
Visitors did not enjoy the feeling of missing out on experiences
Ease of interaction was important; don't want to feel too committed
Overwhelming amounts of information at the museum

From these insights, we synthesised 3 design goals:

Reframing existing stories through alternative perspectives

Give agency to participants

Big and Small moments that feel complete

Empathy mapping workshop (Microsoft Whiteboard)

These design goals provided high level orientation markers throughout our ideation and development workshops. As key creative facilitator, I consistently took notes to revert directions of ideas and concepts during group activities back towards these goals.

Together, we compiled insights from the empathy map and interview analyses into 2 user personas; a casual museum visitor aiming to pass time in a meaningful way for fun, and an culture enthusiast seeking inspiration and insight. Both groups differ in their levels of existing knowledge and degree of detail, but are united in a desire to learn something new and interesting.

Personas detail and layout by Durva

IDEATION AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Moderation and facilitation driving a creative, productive design process.

We initially utilised 'worse possible idea' ideation with the underlying theme of the collection 'who owns by data' as a prompt. Following this, we held a concept development workshop of our chosen concept idea from the ideation session.

While multiple concepts were explored, the “data point as a character” concept consistently presented the most interesting solutions for achieving our main design goal of reframing existing narratives. We felt that the biggest strength of this idea was how it illustrated objects in use, which was currently not obvious in the collection display. I facilitated this session by planning the format and ensuring the group was collectively engaged to contribute creatively towards the goals of the session, which was to develop a fleshed-out concept for design development.

As the details took form, we changed our approach by exploring an alternative visualisation to show all the storylines in radial form.

After some further development and discussion, we felt that this was a stronger core concept, and provided additional opportunities for enhancing visitor experiences.

Concept diagram (Online group workshop conducted via Microsoft Whiteboard)

Developed concept diagram (Caro)

Storyboard (Yuki)

Anatomy of design diagram (Yuki)

TESTING WITH USERS

Devising solutions to user testing with simulated technology

As we were unable to conduct the usability test on location or to scale, the prototype (built by Caro in Figma) was shown to participants on an iPad, with a photo of the museum display the interactive is built for put on display.

While we approached our solution with the belief that there should be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for the user to use the system, we have not been able to identify an appropriate way to introduce error correction or make clarifications for users in the final solution.
This is a common challenge with designing interactives for museums that our solution has not quite been able to address effectively.

Prototype testing using an iPad

REFLECTION

Having different perspectives from both visitors and the people who work at the museum was vital to our research and design.

Our user research was broad enough that we were able to get diverse perspectives. Including visitors, practitioners, and specific in-house perspectives informed our research very holistically. Although nerve-wrecking at first, I quite enjoyed the experience of recruiting strangers for the interviews, and listening to their perspectives for later advocacy during the design process.

We made continuous effort to generate new ideas even after finding ideas we liked to ensure we did not fixate onto a single concept.

Our design process stayed user centred as we referenced our user personas and target audience throughout each stage. We maintained a very flexible process that allowed us to iterate and generate derivative concepts without being too focused on a specific outcome.