 Tena koutou katoa nō kone aho ko Mike Hayama ho. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. My name is Mike, and that's the moon. I am from here. I am from Wellington, from Te Papa, and as Lucy said, I am the lead UX designer here. Thank you. So as Dan and Kate just shared before, what is UX in case, and you're not too familiar with what UX is, it stands for user experience, and it's about incorporating the user into your whole design process. So it goes beyond, say, graphic design or visual design, but using methodologies and processes to imbue the whole design process with the voice of the user. And as Pia mentioned earlier this morning, I thought this was a really awesome way of talking about UX. It's almost like giving institutions the tool of empathy, giving them the understanding of who the users are and what they need from you. So that's what UX is all about. And a translation. I spoke to Midania, one of our writers, who writes in Te Reo Māori, and he translated user experience design as Hea Tarai Waka Pū Manawa. And he gave the translation of creating products that provide meaningful and personally relevant experiences. Hea Tarai Waka Pū Manawa, which I thought was pretty cool. So I've got a really important question to start off with this afternoon, which is, should I wear togs? Excellent. Thank you, Dan. Should I wear togs? And what am I getting at here? What's the point? Let's move on. OK, what if I show you this picture? OK, should I wear togs? Yes, I see some nodding heads. People are like, yep, OK. At the beach, you should wear togs. That's exactly what I want to wear at the beach. What about this beach? Oh, no. Not at this beach. OK, so at a tropical beach, yes, in the sunshine, yes, but at an arctic or Antarctic beach, no, shouldn't wear togs. OK, what about here? Should I wear togs now? Or, you know that feeling of turning up somewhere and you're entirely underdressed? You know that, ooh, cringe. I expect you would feel that way if you wore togs here. Let's check out that clicker. Nope. There we go. What about at this party? Oh, yeah, pool party. I don't know why grown adults are wearing togs at a pool party, but that's OK. I expect if you were wearing togs at the pool party, that would be appropriate and cool. So what I'm getting at here is should I wear togs? Well, with such an open-ended question, the only way to really answer that is it depends. And it depends on your context. It depends on the situation. It depends on much more than just should I wear togs. Where are you? You know, why are you there? Understanding that context is how you understand if it's appropriate. And beyond that, understanding if you're digital experience, understanding if your product or what you're making or your service is appropriate, is also you need to understand that context and that wider situation in which you find yourself. Just asking is this good is not enough. It's good, but where, but why, but how, for who? And so today I'm talking about context as queen, obviously riffing off the phrase content as king. And so while we have this appreciation for our content and the importance of heroine content, you know, we see the rise of content strategists and sort of there's a lot of discussion these days around the importance of your content, I would equally argue that understanding your context is so important too. So what do I mean when I say context? Well, we often ask the question who is this for? And when you're saying you're asking that kind of question, you're talking about your users or your visitors or your target market or your segment. And so we use this a lot, you know, user experience. We're used to asking this type of question, who? And if you're talking about what or you're asking the question what, you're talking about content. What's your story? What's your service? What's your information? That's your content. But if you're asking questions like where, when, why, how and with, you're starting to talk about context. And those are the sorts of things we'll be talking about today. And I'm arguing that you need to ask those other questions, not just who and not just what, but where, when, why, how and with to understand that context. Is that cool? Yep, cool. So this is another picture of context. So here are your users, trapped in a little grey circle. And here's your content. And the idea is that you're trying to find the place where your users meet your content through the service, through an app, through an exhibition, through a website. You're trying to make a time where your content, your story is your information overlap with some people that you're trying to reach. And the context is the situation that envelops them all. The context of the situation where they come together. And if you get all those things right, party in the middle, yeah. So context is queen. And why do I care so much about context? Why do I, why would I even make this a talk? It's because I work in a weird one. So museums are weird. I come from a digital agency, so I've worked atopapa for about 18 months. The UX team has only been a permanent thing here for about 11 months. So I work with Kate Wondless, who was just speaking before, and with Karen Bryce, our UX UI designer. And so we've all come from digital agencies. And I think all of us can appreciate that it's been a bit of a culture shock to come to the glam sector. Don't get me wrong, working at a museum is great. We talk about 19th century portraiture, we talk about whakapapa and whanonatanga, or colonialism, or wetter, digital marketing, how to get visitors to donate. That's just what we cover often one morning. So the content we work with here is fantastic. And it's exciting. But it's also a really strange place, I would argue, to do digital, especially when you've come from a digital agency with often different ways of working with different audiences. And so I'm going to speak to you today a little bit about what it's like to sort of shift from a digital agency into an in-house digital team within a museum. Although I'm making the point that Context is Queen and museums are weird. So I'm going to focus on sort of three of these questions today, asking sort of how we're asking things like where, why and with, how we've done sort of with different projects we've worked on kind of explains this idea of Context. So first of all, where? Where are our users or our visitors? Interesting point about users. I've heard that there's only two industries that really refer to their customers as users, the digital design and the drug industry. So where are our visitors? Where are our people at? Where are our people? Where are our visitors? And what's really strange as well is that usually you would never ask this question if you work for a digital agency. If you're making a website, you wouldn't really ask where because, well, I mean, it's a website, they could be anywhere. But it's really strange to be like, well, if we're working for exhibition design, we can say very precisely where they are when they will interact with our content. And that's quite unusual for a digital team to have that kind of specificity around location. And so it leads me to this discussion of sort of the superiority of digital. I would argue that a lot of us here have this kind of implicit expectation that digital is superior somehow. We think about things like digital transformation and technological advances. We think about the way we hire movies. I mean, I'm old enough to remember going to the video store and picking a VHS off the shelf. If it wasn't already booked out, you know how it was really annoying to put all those video cases on the shelf still, but some of them would be booked out so you couldn't get it. You take your second choice, your third choice, you take it home. And if you weren't lucky, the video would be scratched and have those grey lines kind of going up the screen endlessly. And then you'd have to remember to take it back the next day otherwise you'd be charged massive fines. And then it got even worse with DVD rental when sometimes the DVDs were so scratched they wouldn't even play at all. And now we think about how that's changed. My wife and I, we don't have a broadcast TV. We just watch everything through the internet. Netflix, iTunes, even YouTube, you can rent movies from now. And within 20 seconds, you're watching the movie that you chose the first choice because there's no physical stock that can be depleted and there's no problems with damaged DVDs or whatever. It's not even enough time to make popcorn. And so we're so used to how digital has sort of disrupted and improved these ways of services and things we use. We think about Uber, Amazon, Netflix and so on. And so coming into a museum where I kind of implicitly had this expectation that digital does things better has been really challenged by working in the physical space of a museum. And to make that point, let's think about the Mona Lisa. We can all conjure up the Mona Lisa in our head. And when I was doing some research on this, I found that it was last valued or insured back in the 60s. It was valued for insurance purposes, sorry, at about $100 million US. And that in today's dollars that would be about $750 million US. So by far and away the most expensive painting on the planet. And this is what it looks like in the gallery. I haven't actually been there, but I'm sure many of you have. And what I'm told is that you're kept at bay by sort of a meter back by these bollards. And it's behind bulletproof glass. It's that painting obviously in the centre. And it's visited by 6 million people a year. More than our entire country's worth of people flock into this tiny room to see the tiny painting behind bulletproof glass kept at bay by bollards. And that really fascinates me, this idea that people still flock to see this. Even though the actual experience of seeing it is quite poor, especially given that I can google within five seconds on Wikimedia Commons bring up a high-res image of the Mona Lisa. And on my Mac screen, this is like beautiful, this image. And it's, you know, super high-res. You can get right up close to it. And yet still 6 million people go to visit the painting. And so let's do a bit of a thought experiment. Imagine you work at the Louvre and, you know, someone higher up, your boss is boss is boss, says, oh, I've been to this really cool gallery somewhere else, and I think what we need to do is ease congestion in that gallery. So we're going to take high-res images of the Mona Lisa and we're going to put them on screens. And we're going to let people sort of pinch and zoom and interact with the Mona Lisa digital version elsewhere so that we can ease the congestion in that room. Would that ease congestion? I would argue absolutely not. I would say if you gave people the digital version so that you don't have to go and see the real version, you would do nothing to dent the congestion in that room. And that leads me to a topic called the aura of the object. And this phrase was first termed by Walter Benjamin. And he speaks about how objects and artefacts and artworks have this sort of innate aura or mana which can't just be sort of replicated or transferred. You think about, say I've got that high-res image of Mona Lisa and I could get it printed at the Warehouse stationery on canvas. Would I get anywhere close to $750 million US? Like, that's a joke, right? And even if I was a master painter and I could recreate the painting, would I get anywhere close to $750 million US? Again, no. We want to see the object. We want to see the Mona Lisa. Not a copy, not even the picture but the Mona Lisa. And that's the aura of the object or the mana that belongs to these objects. And so there's this real sense of physicality in the museum around the objects and the artworks that we serve. And that's really interesting when you come from digital where that's quite intention with how we've often worked when we sort of disrupt industries and we sort of replace services and we make things better. Or can often not make things better. So here's a quote from a participant in a survey from a company called Morris Hargroves McIntyre that did some research for Tupapa early last year. And this participant told MHM, I used to think the exact opposite. That there should be touchscreens at every corner so you can always get the information. Now it would be more inclined to leave all that out so you just focus on the artwork itself. Leave out the touchscreens. I want to focus on the object. I want to think about the artwork. The touchscreens are a distraction. They're annoying me. Get them out. I want to focus on the object. I think live music is another kind of example of this idea of the importance of being in the space in the physical environment. We all have bands that we love or artists that we just follow and we have all their music. We know what they look like. We know every word. But when they come to town, we still go to see them because it's not about their music. We already had their music. It was about the physical experience of being with them, being present, seeing them in the flesh. If it was about just their content, about their music or about their look, we could find images of them online. We have their music already. It's about being in that presence of them, being in the aura and being in that physical environment. This is another participant in the same sort of study and they said one of my favourite things about places like Te Papa is the art. I'd like that to be as physical as possible. I think digital gadgets can distract from that. This is a really interesting place for us to work in in terms of the digital team where we're actually suddenly not the superior like hey, digital just makes things everything better. Think about the VHS example. Suddenly digital was like, hang on, these physical objects, these physical artworks are really important and we can't just override them. We need to focus on what digital can do only. Do what only digital can do. A really good example of this is found in Gallipoli where there's some pieces of real ammunition taken from World War I and what you can do is you can actually interact with those objects and see the CGI skeleton be impacted by the ammunition. It's interesting to get the visceral feeling of this rusted shrapnel or this exploding artillery shell and then that's augmented by this digital experience. Not surpass or not overpowered by. The presence of the objects is really potent and still there and the digital adds a layer of storytelling. When we're asking questions like where, thinking about this physical environment we work in, we need to make sure we don't assume that digital experience is a superior. Moving along. Who are our visitors with? This is another interesting question. You don't often hear a digital agency saying who are our users and when they're using the website, who sits next to them? That wouldn't be something we'd hear at a digital agency, but it's something that we consider. I'm referring to a study here from a company called IMPACS and they study cultural organisations in the US and they had a survey and they asked these people who had been to some sort of cultural organisation what's the best thing about a visit to a cultural organisation and by a factor of almost three times people said spending time with family and friends was more important and more valuable than seeing or interacting with the exhibits, the performance themselves. And so Colin Dillinshnider blogs about this sort of content and she phrased this study in terms of with this greater than what where who people are with often has a greater impact on their experience and their visit than the what they were interacting with. So more so than the interactions they have with you and your content as an institution it's the interactions that they have together as a group that can lead to a successful visit or a positive happy visit. And again Colin said cultural institutions are facilitators of shared experiences. Again referring back to that study another participant said this And the interesting thing with digital right is that it can be so immersive and so captivating and so enchanting and yet often it's made for a one-to-one relationship where we have these handheld devices that are really only made for one person to use at a time or a touchscreen or a computer with one mouse, one keyboard and are really made for one-to-one relationships and when you combine that kind of enchanting and intriguing nature with a one-to-one device you end up with something like this this is an image from an artist called Anton Giga from France and I think this is so perfectly something I feel like he made this for my presentation these people in the cultural institution cut off from the physical and the social context that they actually in because of the one-to-one relationship and the immersive nature that digital can provide. So what do we do with that? Well we make sure that we don't neglect the group we consider the group not just the user So imagine you've got six dots and they've come to your institution and they're interacting with some sort of hexagonal screen or something and this is what you might think about your user so you think about your device and your user and what do they get from you what information can you convey but there's another layer to this and that's this and how do they interact together with the experience you're creating for the group via your experience or your touch screen or your digital table So focus on the interaction between the members of the group not just on the device to user relationship and that's a bit airy-fairy what does that mean, what does that look like well we're still figuring this out too but we've got an example that's quite useful So this is Artwall this is a project that I worked on with a digital producer, Prue Donald here and a wider team supported by a much wider team and you can go see it up on level 4 and it's really great, a bit of a plug I think I'll talk about it later on too so I'll move on but this was doing some prototype testing and Kate on this was doing some prototype testing on the floor when we had Artwall, a beta version of it on a tablet and we were showing visitors what we were thinking of at the time and this group of French students came in and these five students and of course it sounds so much cooler in French and they're passing the device around really excitedly sort of posting Artworks up onto the wall and discussing and debating and having a really good time passing the tablet around for each person to have a turn and what was happening is that the technology faded into the background and it wasn't about the kiosk or the touchscreen it was about the art and the people and the technology was just facilitating that experience and so that's what we mean when we talk about how do we create an experience for the group and a social digital experience not just conveying information from a screen to a single person digital touch tables are something else we've explored recently we've done some prototyping and taken it down to the floor and the reason why these are interesting is that they are tables like this big and they can register 80 points of touch it's 8 pairs of hands and it really democratises the interaction because no one person is in control you don't have a keyboard and a mouse for one user you have a whole table where everyone can touch and the technology you choose can start to change the way the digital is served so when you're asking the question of with digital often focuses on the individual so be mindful of the group and lastly why are our visitors here now obviously this is a really big topic about motivations so we're going to be skimming this but hopefully I can give you a bit of an idea around thinking about the user journey and understanding why people have come to you can affect the product and the decisions you make so let's imagine this text conversation someone says hey what should we do today oh I hear there's this good war exhibition on it to Papa oh yeah it's free I feel it's amazing we could swing past Mojo on the way okay I'm in I'll pick you up in 10 now this is a rather pointedly glib kind of example here but what I'm trying to illustrate is that the motivations for coming to the museum theory people come here for all sorts of different reasons adults are kicking their kids out on a rainy day on school holidays people here at conferences and they're taking a break so they wander into an exhibition where routinely listed as a top 10 destination for Wellington so people drop in because it's a thing to do and what it means is that people are sometimes coming here without really understanding what content they're about to see they come in here kind of slightly unsure of what's next and I recently experienced this by going to Auckland War Memorial Museum for the first time and it's quite interesting when you walk into a new museum or a new institution and you don't actually know what you're about to see and it feels a little bit like being in a pinball machine kind of bouncing from thing to thing not quite you know expecting what's this, what's that, what's here, what's there where you're browsing this wide variety of content and not quite sure exactly what's next I think of it a little bit like being on social media and when you open up Facebook you're not actually particularly looking for a specific piece of content you're sort of just there to see what's there and it's a little bit like that sometimes when you're in a museum where you don't actually know what's next you're just kind of seeing what's there this gif never gets to an end by the way you're all slightly transfixed and I want to compare this to another digital example so I used to be a front-end dev and I built these calculators or was on a team that built these calculators and and so and I also used these recently because my wife and I purchased our first home and this is the exact opposite of sort of browsing or trawling social media where I've got a task in mind I've got this high intrinsic motivation I want to buy a house, we want to buy a house we want to figure out what our repayments are going to be and so I use this as a tool I have questions, I need answers this is a task-focused kind of digital experience and so when the UX team we talk about sort of this continuum of browsing and seeking and how some experiences are really in this mode of people are in this mode of seeking out information seeking out answers and this other mode of operating people can be in browsing mentality when they're pinballing around Facebook and so understanding what kind of mode we're operating in can really affect the decisions we make and got an example so think about the YDS journey and an example of this is actually back to Artwall now before I mentioned the immersive qualities of one-to-one relationships with a phone and how that can be a really bad thing but that's not a rule that we stick by and in fact there's an important way that we've sort of actually gone against that recently with Artwall so we refer to BYOD as bring your own device and it's something that we're interested in doing in the museum but with caution, trying to avoid this idea of people stuck in their phones and the reason why we decided to prioritise this was because of the location of where it was put so it's installed near Espresso Cafe up on level 4 and so what are people doing in Espresso Cafe and why have they come there why are people going to Espresso Cafe it's because they're tired, they need a break they probably need a coffee they're probably just needing to refresh and rejuvenate and what do people do when they refresh and rejuvenate these days when they're bored they whip out their phone and so we were trying to leverage that idea of people being in that space being in that mode and trying to serve them art and it's been really successful as over interactions of Artwall have been on people's own devices as opposed to the kiosk on the floor and we've had an average session duration of almost six minutes of people being on their own devices engaging with Artwall so we've really tapped into a really important way of serving people content on their own devices because we've understood the why to use a journey so again when you're asking why make sure you don't neglect your user journey mapping understand why your users are here what's brought them here what are their motivations what mode of operating are they in right now and how can you use that to leverage your experience or your service so museums are weird they put an innately they innately put a strong focus on the physical and social environments and that's quite unusual for digital people museums are filled with visitors who are browsing with no clear goals they're not necessarily seeking out an answer to a question they're kind of eyes open going what's next and so we can't just lift and shift solutions that might work in other industries we really have to consider our environment our situation and our context so how is this being offered is it through a touch screen is it through a touch table is it through augmented reality is it on people's own devices where is it being offered is it in a thoroughfare in a busy part of the exhibition or is it in a quiet contemplative state understanding your user's context is imperative to making good decisions when it comes to making a digital product or an experience think back to the Toggs example should I wear Toggs, that's not enough we have to ask where so we're at a beach, not just any beach at a tropical beach so Toggs are appropriate but why are you there, I'm at a wedding so maybe Toggs are no longer appropriate so maybe you shouldn't wear Toggs at the tropical beach but who are you with I'm with Dan, it's Dan's wedding everyone's got a friend like Dan and you can totally wear Toggs at Dan's wedding at the tropical beach so asking the where, the why, the with keeps changing the appropriateness or the success measures that you've got so keep asking those questions where, when, why, how and with so to understand your users and to understand how your content fits in their lives you must understand their context so context is queen and bloody weird nama hinoe, thanks