INTERACTIVE MUSEUM APP
Interface & Interaction Design | Student Work 2023
The interactive museum exhibit project included creating an app with a unique interactive element to represent an exhibit at a museum. The main objective of this project was to create a new and exciting way for museum-goers to experience exhibits, while following iOS guidelines. The chosen exhibit was the Community Coral Exhibit at the Ontario Science centre.
INTERFACE |
INTERFACE |
RATIONALE
BACKGROUND
The community coral exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre showcases crochet pieces that replicate real deep sea coral. The exhibit aims to bring awareness to a variety of endangered marine life and damage to reefs and ocean ecosystems.
The project objective is to create an interactive museum app, to help museum-goers experience this exhibit in a new, interactive way, and to provide an engaging experience for a variety of demographics who may visit the museum. The app should represent the exhibit in a virtual way.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The target audience of this app is students of all ages, as well as families. Families and schools make up a significant portion of musuem guests, and family trips and school trips are the most likely demographics to have use for an app with different tasks, challenges, games, and more. The app was created with children in mind; it has fun colours, decently large buttons, and fairly simple language. Some younger children may need to ask for help with some parts, but most children who are familiar with current social media or games on iOS devices will have no trouble navigating the app.
TYPOGRAPHY, COLOURS & IMAGERY
The colours were chosen to match the theme of deep sea coral, dark for the deep water, and bright for the colours of the coral. The typography is a simple sans-serif that is easy to read at a variety of sizes. The font is also not too thin, which makes it work in a reverse colour scheme like this one.
The imagery is of bright and colourful coral, as well as some crochet coral pieces. The pictures are interesting and engaging, and provide context to the crochet coral in the exhibit.
he design of the app uses a very deep blue for the background, a colour choice to match the topic and resemble the ocean. The text and graphics are all very vibrant colours, something often seen in coral, the app mainly uses pink, as well as some vibrant blue and orange.
GESTURES
The gestures I wanted to include but couldn’t due to software limitations include; swipe up to access camera from any page, double tap to open an image on the search page, and pinch to zoom on the camera.
The app works with 4 main gestures; tap, pinch, swipe, and double-tap. Almost everything uses the tap gesture as it is simple and common. Pinch to zoom is also common, and something most users will know if they’ve previously used any sort of camera app.
FEATURES
The main features of this app are the camera/scanning page, search for coral page, and the quiz/minigame pages. The camera page is the most important feature, as it allows users to connect the crocheted coral with the real-world versions, as well as providing some information on different roles of different corals in their ecosystems. The search for coral page lets users search for a specific type or a broad class of coral so they can gather more information about it. Users may find the search page helpful, as it can provide more information on the coral they scan throughout their visit.
iOS GUIDELINES
One of the project requirements was to follow Apple UI guidelines. This project uses elements from the UI kit provided by apple and familiar layouts for sign-in pages, navigational elements, buttons, etc, which all helped create an app that followed iOS guidelines.
Touch targets are suggested 59px by 59px, and each touch target within this app is this size or only slightly smaller on one edge, for example extremely long buttons are approximately 50px tall but at least 250px wide, which still makes them easy to click. The target audience is also within a range where they most likely are quite familiar with phones and other personal devices, so they are familiar with buttons that look like this. All colours, buttons, touch targets, and type have been accessibility checked for an optimal user experience.
The type sizes vary between 16px to 24px, and different type elements use bold/regular to establish some hierarchy. The font is Arial, a recognizable sans-serif font, which was used in the Apple UI kit. The app also has some overlays and pop-ups, which also follow Apple UI standards, and will look familiar to any iOS user. These are mostly to get across key information like what gestures to use, etc. There is also a pop up when a user scans crocheted coral, that provides information on the real-world version of the piece of coral that was scanned.