In advance of ISO’s submission of the detailed design of the Design Unwrapped exhibit to their client (the V&A Dundee) it was essential to ensure that the clients’ desires for the content and interaction style met the expectations of a diverse demographic of potential users. Therefore, we devised a rigorous set of questions to encourage focus groups members to reflect on their most positive and negative past museum experiences, and hypothesise about how they would like to interact with ISO’s bespoke exhibits (prompted by images and brief verbal explanations). Crucially, we also invited the V&A Dundee curation team to answer the same questions, so we can discern whether the visitors’ primary interests match the curators’ target messages (content) and find that the hopes for the interaction with the exhibits are also matched. If there were any glaring mismatches in expectations then it is not too late to take these into account to adapt the user interfaces and even the subject matter, or length of segments of content. The questions were written specifically to pick up on the intended target messages mapped out in the V&A’s learning outcomes, whilst also leaving room for focus group participants to express their individual motivations for visiting museums, their personal learning desires and ideal modes of interaction.
The key objectives were to find out:
• what is the ideal style of interaction for each exhibit (voice/motion activated, touch screen…)
• what is the ideal format of informative content (text/dialogue based or sounds/imagery of production methods…)
• what is the ideal layout of the hardware.