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Mobile User experience

Experiencing The O at MONA – a review

A lot has been written about the Museum of Old and New Art and I’m not going to rehash any of that. Instead I’m going to look at their mobile guide – The O – which is provided to every visitor and included in the admission price.

Here some of the fleet of 1300 Os sit charging in enormous custom charging bays where they can also be updated.

The O is an iOS App that runs on an iPod Touch comes ready to run and with a quality pair of Audio Technica headphones. Developed by Art Processors, The O is described thus;

Wall labels are at once didactic and limited. They inhibit imagination. Squinted at through a dozen huddled heads, they are barely useful tools for learning, much less free thinking, or a private appreciation of the objects they describe.

The O solves these problems. It delivers information in a way that enhances the visitor’s experience of the gallery, and enables curators and exhibition designers to display the works the way they want. Museum researchers can present the best, most relevant textual, visual and audio content at their discretion. It provides information on visitor viewing habits, trending and satisfaction via integrated statistical reports. Above all, The O is an intimate, intuitive interface of the learning and autonomous response.

None of this would matter if it was a pain to use.

I was very impressed by the ‘technology concierge’ skills of the ticketing staff – they run you through the basics of the App and the hardware as they sell you your ticket and set you off on your way. Sitting beside the cash register is a graphic clearly explaining each of the main interface screens of the O as well. I’ve never seen this level of ‘scaffolding’ happen in other museums and the deftness with which visitors are set off on their way quickly is a testament to their staff training (and acceptance amongst these staff of the value of the O itself).

Descending into the museum itself you launch the O and you are off. Pop up instructions help you through the basic App operations and after a while you are prompted to enter your email address (and optional country) to ‘save’ your journey to the MONA website. Once this is done there are no further prompts and even when, as I did, returned after lunch and was given a different O device, the final ‘saved tour’ seemed to accurately aggregate my whole visit (over the two different devices).

At its most basic level The O replaces wall labels. Entering a space you simply click ‘Update’ and, using wifi triangulation a proprietary real-time system (see comments), the device provides a list, with thumbnails, of objects ‘near’ you. This works surprisingly well despite the split levels and bulk showcases of coins and other small objects in some areas. The scrollable list relieves the technology of the difficult task of ‘exactly positioning the visitor’ whilst at the same time emphasising the visitor’s own agency in choosing what they are ‘seeing’. (I think this is going to be an increasingly important balance as location and compass headings give mobile devices better granularity at guessing what you are looking at).

However the most impressive part of The O is the content – not the technology.

The O provides simple label text and an image for every object. I was disappointed that the images weren’t zoomable, however on most objects there was also a curator’s piece amusingly titled Art Wank. These were short, very accessible and gave useful context and background without overdoing it. A slightly smaller subset of objects are augmented with options called ‘Ideas’, ‘Gonzo’, and ‘Media’. It is in these three areas that The O really differentiates itself from every other museum mobile App or guide I’ve experienced.

‘Ideas’ is simply a set of provocations – or talking points. Some are quotes, others are just statements. One of the many ‘delighters’ I discovered on The O visiting with my companion (with her own O), was that often there were multiple ‘Ideas’ and that very rarely would we both get the same one at the same time. This gave us prompts to talk to each about the objects we were looking at – ensuring that sociality was not eroded by every visitor being glued to their own screens.

‘Gonzo’ is almost mostly responses or stories from MONA’s owner David Walsh. Sometimes these are stories about the acquisition of various objects, other times they are hilarious, for want of a better word, ‘rants’ about the artist, a style, or a moment. Like the ‘Ideas’ they make great talking points.

‘Media’ are short audio files – interviews with the artist and others. Some objects also have songs by Damien Cowell who was commissioned to record them ‘about’ certain works.

The interviews blew me away.

Unlike every other ‘museum tour’ the audio interviews are completely raw and lo-fi. This shocked me – and I loved it. Almost all the interviews that I listened to sounded like they were recorded in a noisy cafe – and in more than a few the interviewee’s mobile phone rang in the middle of the recording (usually followed by an apology ‘sorry I’m in a meeting’). This made it so approachable and friendly – and, importantly, felt candid – like I was there with the artist. This also reminded me that the quality of the content always trumps the fidelity of the recording.

‘Loving’ or ‘hating’ objects is possible too, and doing so gives you a simple quantitative statistic on the objects popularity amongst other visitors. I did wish that this recommended me other things to go and see. I also missed any kind of search functionality – I understand that this is probably because ‘searching’ is the exact kind of intentionality that MONA is trying to disrupt, instead forcing you to be in the moment – but it was frustrating when there were certain works I knew about that I wanted to locate.

Leaving MONA, the headphones and The O were given back to the friendly staff at the door. Arriving back home, there in my inbox was an email from MONA linking me to their website where I could browse through the objects that I’d seen – after supplying the email address I used to register), and find out which I’d missed.

The post-visit web experience is interesting in that it requires a MONA visit (and user registration through The O) to get access. On one hand this might seem exclusionary – and is definitely an option that is really now only open to private museums with no public mandate – but on the other hand this did re-emphasise the importance of connecting the physical experience of MONA and its works with the online experience. And, that I couldn’t access the objects of the museum before my visit (beyond a few selected pieces), meant that I was more open to exploring than targeting only things I was interested in when I was in the galleries.

On the web you have access to all the same content you could get on The O – the audio, the text, but rather disappointingly only the same small size of image. Your path through MONA is visualised and able to be played back on a timeline. I’m not sure that this adds any navigation ‘value’ but it does re-emphasise the physicality of visiting MONA, its unique spatial construct, and its primacy in understanding and experiencing ‘the works’ inside.

This is one of the few examples of where a museum website actually enhances the post-visit experience by connecting it concretely back to the physical experience (and does so be explicitly preventing pre-visit planning and expectations).

There’s a couple of minor quirks (primitive audio player controls especially) with The O but overall it sets a new benchmark in terms of integrated interpretative devices.

I do wonder, though, how much it relies upon a few uniquely MONA attributes – its entirely private vision (versus public duty/mission), the design of the museum itself which prevents any other form of internet access (it is underground), and the tabula rasa upon which it has been able to construct its content all at once (no legacy material or practices to deal with)?

And, how the aggregate usage data – the loves/hates, the pieces that are most/least viewed, the contours of content – is used will be fascinating to see.

25 replies on “Experiencing The O at MONA – a review”

Hi Seb,

This is Scott from Art Processors.  We were responsible for building The O for Mona.  Thanks for taking the time to review our system, and glad you enjoyed it.  We did our best to make the technology transparent and allow the content to shine through.  It is great to hear from someone who works in the field that we were able to achieve this goal.

I would like to qualify one point that you’ve made.   You state that we use WiFi triangulation to obtain a users location and this isn’t technically correct.  WiFi triangulation is still a way off giving the level of detail that we required for locating users down at Mona.  Instead we use a separate dedicated real-time location system. 

Thanks again,
Scott.

http://www.artprocessors.net

Hi Scott,

The company which provided the dedicated Real-Time Location System is it Purelink Canda?
I am working for a museum and I have found their product online. I was about to contact them when I read your post.
Thanks anyway.
Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Yes it was Purelink. I would be happy to answer any questions you have about our experience work with them. Send me an email and we can talk about it. Email address is [my first name] @ artprocessors.net.

Cheers,

Scott

Hi Seb

I was also fascinated by The O.  I saw a few people struggling to use it, but most seemed to find it pretty straightforward. As you said, the introduction was incredibly well done.

Do you think that it might signal the end of the caption and wall text in major art galleries. I can imagine galleries directors wanting to create clean, uncluttered walls.

I had a couple of grimaces about the interface. It was too easy to accidentally ‘Love’ or ‘Hate’ something. And I wonder about its accessibility – the iPod is a pretty accessible device, but this seems to be custom software, that may have thrown a lot of that away.

My main beef about the lack of search is that you can’t use it to find your way back to an artwork that you liked – or not easily, anyway. Maybe I just missed that bit.

We found at least one artwork that had no entry whatsoever, which meant that there was no information, not even a title, that we could use to find out more later.

I thought that the post-visit thing was cute, but almost unusable. This is mostly because the whole thing is built in Flash, with that annoying ‘twirl-me’ navigation. Maybe it is just me, but trying to find a particular artwork seemed to be a bit tricky.

Having said that, I think that the post-visit part has the potential to be enormously powerful because it allows me to make MONA my museum. That is, I can connect back to the gallery and its collection in ways that I normally wouldn’t be able to do.

Yes the lack of search was an issue for me too – more so in the post-visit mode where there didn’t seem to be any reason for its omission. In gallery I can understand that a design choice may have been made to prevent people from ‘searching’ and forcing you to explore MONA instead. That rationale doesn’t carry to the web though.

This is obviously an ‘App’ but there is no reason why the device’s accessibility features can’t be called in the OS. Scott at Art Processors would be able to answer those questions.

As far as this replacing labels across more museums, I don’t know. The infrastructure requirements will not be trivial – not to mention designing and implementing new production workflows for all the content. I expect that this sort of approach is likely to be easiest for new museums or those undergoing a major rebuild to implement quickly. Retrofitting and integrating legacy content have always been the elephants in the room with regard to in-gallery technology rollouts.

Hello Seb,
Absolutely wonderful review, great insights, just the right amount of information. Thanks so much.  We haven’t met but we’re both on deck to be writing chapters for the next edition of the AAM book ‘Mobile Apps for Museums’.  As Nancy tapped me as the general content expert, I was entirely fascinated by your description of this content.  Question: is there content which is only accessible on the post-visit website?  That could be fantastic: memory content.

Sandy Goldberg
http://www.sgscript.net

Post-visit web-only content – not that I could see. Except for your map of where you’d been, which, as Jonathan pointed out, isn’t actually all that usable. No doubt this will change over time.

Hi Seb,  
Great review, and a ton of food for thought.  I am particularly heartened by the universal access decision MONA took.  Making it part of the admission price is refreshing. With every audio/multimedia tour I’ve worked on, we would have the debate about whether to bundle it or charge separately for it, and would always opt for making the admission price seem as low as possible.  For a content developer, it meant that you knew you were making stuff that maybe 20% of your audience (if you were lucky!) might actually use.   Not a nice feeling…

I think it would be valuable to look more deeply at what can be generalized from the experience.  I agree that the public/private differences are huge, but we’re all trying to crack similar use cases.  I’d be surprised if there aren’t some lessons, examples, or insights that the community can tkae away from this.  Somebody ought to rope these guys into presenting at MW or MCN. That’s a session I’d be glad to attend!

[…] In January 2011, Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art opened offering visitors a mobile experience known as The O. The O used an iPod touch paired with an indoor location tracking tag to deliver location relative contextual information to visitors as they travelled throughout the gallery. When visitors were inspired by a work and wanted to know more about it they tapped a button to update their location and the work appeared on screen allowing them to read, listen, view content and provide their thoughts on the works via love and hate buttons. The O was a huge hit with visitors (over 97% of visitors to MONA use it) and Art Processors was formed to commercialise the technology and offer the solution to other institutions, you can read more about The O via a more recent article here or one from when it first came out here. […]

[…] As Seb Chan noted in his blog, content rather than technology really maketh the O. Like Seb, I particularly like the lo-fi audio interviews. I can hear a kettle going off in the background, cups clinking. I’m there with the artist. In a world now accustomed to spontaneous, mobile video and audio footage, we need to ask ourselves when hi-fi is important and when it gets in the way. What sort of experience and emotional impact are we looking for – intimacy or awe? Still, that doesn’t do away with the need for a good edit. 1:30 max please! […]

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