Rituals of Nature

Upon being tasked to create a digital product to enhance a pre-existing exhibition for Naturhistorisk Museum Aarhus, my teammates and I set out to create a solution that felt meaningful, relevant and sparked curiosity in the young-adult visitors of this museum.

Over the course of the project, we worked from scratch to research, design, code and test our solution.

We ultimately produced Rituals of Nature – a thematically dynamic concept consisting of two parts:

  • A large interactive screen primarily utilising body tracking located in the museum's cafe area.

  • Short stories projected in and around the physical exhibition space.

Main Roles

  • User Research

  • Client Research

  • User mapping

  • Interaction Design

  • Graphic Design

  • Usability Testing

Client

Naturhistorisk Museum Aarhus

Project Duration

4 weeks

Team Size

4

Process Overview

Following the Double-Diamond framework, our process was seaparted into the 4 respective phases.


I primarily played a role in:


Discover:

  • Carrying out desk research about the client.

  • Creating the interview guide.

  • Interviewing members of our target demographic.

  • Recording on-site observations.


Define:

  • Creating our Persona.

  • Mapping the customer profile using a Value Proposition Canvas and asking How Might We questions to generate possible solutions.

Develop:

  • Mapping out the userflow for our interactive solution.

  • Creating a thorough OOUX Table

  • Condensing the team's final decision on a solution into a list of requirements.

  • Combining the teams' individual moodboards into one "master" moodboard.

  • Developing a Style Tile from the master moodboard.

  • Designed and carried out two rounds of Think Aloud Testing.


Deliver:

  • Assisted in JavaScript - Coding and fine-tuning body movement/gesture recognition.

Discover

Finding a Foothold

During the discover phase, we had established several key constraints our solution had to fit.


We could add to the physical exhibitions but not change or modify any of the pre-existing exhibits.

Young danish adults generally preferred not to engage with digital installations in museums and the majority felt as though museums were irrelevant to them and their lives.


Our solution had to be outside of the box yet still speak to our target audience on an eye-to-eye level on topics they care about within a very limited amount of physical space.

"What usually makes a museum visit interesting or memorable for you?"

Define

Getting to the Heart of Things

Here I combined all of our research thus far into our persona: Anne-Sofie.


Including our key findings and business objectives ensured that we could quickly recall the core problem we are solving.

Using our VPC and Persona, narrowing down options became much easier.

Why did Rituals of Nature make the cut over other ideas?

Amongst a sea of other ideas, our main contenders aside from Rituals of Nature were:

  • Interactive globe - Learn about the specimens exhibited and their geographic origins

  • Winogradsky Column timeline - An interactive screen to take visitors through the changes over time of colonies within the column.

Although these solutions may have provided excellent learning opportunities for Anne-Sofie, we knew that aspects such as socialisation, novelty and engagement take precedence for her. It is with these aspects that Rituals of Nature: Consent in Paradise shines at expense of the learning aspect.


We proceeded with Rituals of Nature is because the scope of the concept was the most flexible. Both in terms of the size of the team potentially working on it and that the concept can stay always temporally relevant by simply changing the theme.


For example, the theme could be changed from Consent (which was the theme we chose to develop with) to Sustainability or LGBTQ+ issues.

Develop

Realisation

During our development phase we produced two prototypes in Figma. Our Hi-Fi prototype served as a visual guide when coding the solution.

Lo-Fi Testing

Our Lo-Fi prototype was produced with the intent to be used for testing several aspects:

  • Validating the initial designs of our gesture prompts.

    The prompts are based on real world behaviours exhibited by birds of paradise and testing the user's interpretation of our examples of how they should move required multiple iterations to get right.

  • Identifying what our target audience expect and prefer to be "rewarded" with upon successfully attracting a female bird.

  • Establishing what information about the solution our users collect from the onboarding screen and what can be removed or added.

Lo-Fi Figma Prototype

Post-test Changes

  • Success pop-up changed from educational text to a video showing real life examples of the bird behaviour and text directing users to the relevant exhibit.

    Testers consistently ignored the text leaving them with nothing to take away from the experience.

  • Utilised dual-coding to show the user there are two language versions of the information.

    Testers typically mistook the two text versions as one large, related wall of text, became overwhelmed and chose to ignore it.

Later, I conducted a modified version of the same Think-aloud test on the coded prototype. The initial roadblocks identified in our Lo-Fi testing stage were not identified as issues for the testers during the second test signifying the adjustments successfully improved the user experience.

User-Flow

Mood Board & Style Tile

Try out Rituals of Nature: Consent in Paradise!

Go to the Coded Prototype

Get In Touch

elynahenggrundy@gmail.com

+45 42 60 76 52

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elyna-grundy-2229b9324/