i'm currently in a master's program in interactive media at london college of communications. for my dissertation, i'm discussing the implications multi touch, multi user interfaces would have on current information architecture standards.
We designed and built a multi-touch experience for an art museuem exhibition about a year and a half ago. There's a video of the UI available via youtube at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVN-a4x9aTs>.
While the more overt part of the user experience was simply to give visitors a way to look more closely at works of art (where they touch yields about a 4x magnification of the painting), the secondary goal of the experience was to give a way for multiple visitors to have the same experience at the same time and interact with one another. Usually in museums any time there's a group activity it's usually carefully planned and somewhat directed. We wanted an experience where the very design of the experience encouraged multiple users to interact without being aware that it was an unusual application of technology (when we started developing two years ago there were no standard libraries and few reference examples of multi-touch in action).
When we first prototyped the tables with a group of people, we were encouraged when about 8 people all approached the table and began simultaneously interacting with it without realizing that was anything unusual.
So, aside from the physical design and reasons for the tables, we designed the user experience in a very simple way. It would never have dialogue boxes or interactions that brought a single user into focus - where we could, always opt for an amodal solution. Second, we made sure that the parts of the experience that supported the exhibit -- looking at artwork closely -- didn't require the user to immediately interact at the full capabilities of what was possible. ie, if they simply touch the surface, they get some reward that supports the premise. Anything after that -- touch and dragging or better yet multi-touch and dragging, were all bonus rounds of interaction. Nice, but not required. We also deliberately chose not to rely on new interaction patterns that are possible with multitouch (such as grabbing the corners of an object and dragging apart to expand) since we made the assumption that for most visitors that was still new.
We didn't design a complex experience, but all indications were that it worked well. The tables were very popular in the exhibition not as a technology (although there was a percentage of people that recognized them for being something unusual) but rather as a good experience. In visitor testing of the exhibit, we found people spending a long time at the tables, going to look at artworks, and then coming back to explore more.
All in all, we were pleased with the results and I think it succeeded very deliberately because of the design choices we made in the user experience.
-bw. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Bruce Wyman, Director of Technology Denver Art Museum / 100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204 office: 720.913.0159 / fax: 720.913.0002 <[email protected]> ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
