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Yale Peabody Museum
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The Peabody Museum is recognized as a leading science and research institution. Our team worked extensively with museum staff to bridge the gap between the museum's user experiences and stakeholder expectations in order to create a more engaging, immersive user experience.
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The challenge we encountered:
How Might We Immerse Visitors into a Relevant, Current, and Compelling Story Inspired by the Peabody’s Research?
Making Scientific Discovery Accessible
Interviews
Over the course of two weeks,
our team members conducted interviews with users (museum-goers),
potential users (students, community members), and
stakeholders (museum staff).
USERS
STAKEHOLDERS
potential
users
We identified three types of potential users:
Families with
Small Children
More likely to engage with hands-on exhibits and activities
Students
(including Yale students)
Motivated by school projects and other requirements, not necessarily interested in non work-related research
Highly interested individuals
Demonstrates high interest in content, and will read all, or most, of the exhibition descriptions
We began to brainstorm possible solutions that would
target each potential user group's needs and interests.
Stakeholder expectations for visitor experiences, and the average users' actual experiences, did not align.
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Users were attracted to the museum for the experiences it had to offer:
Soaring blockbuster dinosaur exhibits, the beautiful rocks and minerals collection, and more.
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Stakeholders wanted:
Users to engage with the exhibits on a deeper level, and to learn about current research at the Peabody.
We identified key discrepancies at the root of our problem.
We set off to work ideating possible solutions to bridge this gap.
Free
admission?
QR Code with bonus content
Establish relationship with YUAG
Live animal events such as emu hatching
Live animal events such as emu hatching
Researcher talks and Q&A
Our Prototype
A web app
to provide self-guided
tours through the
museum
Such an application would benefit all groups of interest by:
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Getting rid of long descriptions and replacing them with small, easy to understand blurbs for each exhibit
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Providing a “Curated experience through the museum”
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​​Therefore, creating a more interactive experience
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Our final product:
dfayale.com/tours
We created three tour settings targeting each group:
Free
admission?
Highlights
Aimed towards the everyday visitor
Mix of fun facts and engaging questions in easy-to-understand language
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Tots:
Aimed towards visitors with young children
Focus is on engaging questions so young children can interact with the exhibits
Deep Dive:
Focus is on research
Aimed towards visitors who want to learn all the facts and background information
Content: scholarly information and behind-the-scenes photos
Take a tour around the museum at your own pace
Expand portals for fun facts, engaging questions, and bonus content
Track progress around the museums and save interesting points
Next Steps
Help Peabody implement application
Testing: Pending Peabody review to verify content accuracy before testing
Look into using existing staff/resources (like Sci.CORPS) to maintain and update
Create additional “Deep Dive” tour
Add customizable tour features
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