Going Mobile @ Balboa Park

Going mobile: Planning for audience, content and technology in the Museum

a two-day workshop organized by the Balboa Park Online Collaborative and the Balboa Park Learning Institute

http://www.bpoc.org/mobile

Videos & Worksheets

Slides:

Nancy Proctor, Day 1, Content & Experience Design
Titus Bicknell, Day 2, Mobile Platforms & Delivery

Interviews with Titus Bicknell & Nancy Proctor by Stephanie Weaver, Experienceology

Q&A: What are the right questions to ask when going mobile?

Feel free add your questions and answers below and we’ll add to it as we’re able. We invite you to prioritize questions and add your commentaries as well!

Process & Team

Who needs to be involved to make a mobile program successful? Who are the key people to make the process creative?
1. The people who understand your audiences and target audiences best (visitor services; external evaluators; educators; docents & gallery attendants…)
2. The people who understand your mission, messages and collection best (curators, director, interpretation specialists (including publications, web & new media etc.), docents, educators…)
3. The people who will be responsible for implementing and maintaining the solution (fundraisers/development; IT/web & new media; editors; visitor services)
4. The people who will be responsible for promoting the program (marketing, educators, visitor services…)
What are the pros/cons of working with technology consultants (I’d like to; my institution prefers not to)? The big pro of working with consultants is that they generally have worked with lots of different organizations so have accumulated best practice and a wide range of experience that you may not have in-house. The downside is if they take that knowledge away with them at the end of the project; you need to find a way to capture their relevant expertise and keep it in-house once they’ve left – write this step into your project plan, budget and contract! Once it becomes cheaper to do the same quality job in-house than to outsource, hire staff to do it and own the expertise – but budget for ongoing professional development so your organization doesn’t get stuck at one level of expertise. Consider exchanging staff for secondments/sabbaticals at other organizations as a cost-effective way of bringing new ideas and best-practice in-house and investing in your staff’s development and professional satisfaction.
How we can use these techniques to expand on what resources we already have? In addition to analyzing existing content to determine what can be reused in what contexts/platforms, investing in some basic content development skills for staff can take you a long way, e.g. training in content development, podcast production, social media strategy (see SmartHistory.org; Tim Svenonius @ SFMOMA; Seb Chan @ Powerhouse Museum, Australia).
What is the best practice and who are the key people to consult with on mobile strategies? Strategy will of course have to be tailored to your particular institution and program, but here are some important principles:
- Your mobile strategy should respond to and support your overall institutional mission.
- Your mobile strategy should not be developed independently from other institutional strategies: mobile interpretation should be an integral part of other kinds of interpretation planning, exhibition design, collections management, publication, and web and new media strategy.
- For key internal staff, see the list above: “What needs to be involved to make a mobile program a success?”
- If you can afford it, it will always be helpful to bring in an outside consultant with experience in mobile strategy. In addition to their experience, as an outside, ‘neutral’ person, they can often facilitate aspects of the conversation that can be tricky for internal staff.
What are the next steps for institutions who have a mobile presence?
- As both a first and a next step, I’d start with identifying the target audience(s) for your mobile program and evaluating whether your current solution is meeting their needs. There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’, so expect to find a range of responses depending on different audiences’ needs and motivations. You can use the ‘question-mapping‘ technique to find out what your target audiences want to know, where & when during their visit.
- Another good ‘next step’ is to take stock of your content: what have you got, what have you got rights to, and which platforms can your existing content work on? With or without editing/additional effort? From there, evaluating your content management system(s) for mobile content, your metadata and available staff resources would also be a good next step.
- And finally, I think it’s hard to go wrong with a mobile version of key areas of your website and any mobile content you currently have. Titus Bicknell has demonstrated how it’s possible to build a mobile website in WordPress cheaply and quickly, with minimal in-house programming skills.

Technology

How hard is it really to go mobile, to develop mobile applications for museums? It doesn’t have to be that hard, expensive, or require sophisticated technical skills of your staff, but as in all things good planning is key. See the Going Mobile workshop webcasts (coming soon).
Which platforms are most important to target or prioritize? How do we know which app/platform to invest in? (VHS vs Betamax – help clients with social media strategy?) There are pros & cons to each depending on your context. See the Platforms page on this wiki and also resources on the Tate Handheld Conference wiki: platform charts, mind map & presentations by Makoto Manabe & Peter Samis.
How do you prioritize which mobile platforms to focus on? See Titus Bicknell’s platform decision tree from the workshop (coming soon).
Can technology go too far? Yes, if it forgets the content and user experience. The best technology is invisible.
What are the challenges of delivering to multiple smart phones platforms? Different screen sizes, different operating systems, different application environments & capabilities are a few of the big technical differences. Also consider that different smartphones may appeal to different audiences, so their content and experience needs may vary as well. But perhaps the biggest challenge is managing content across platforms, so you don’t have to manually update content in each instance.
How to take an existing audio tour and make it a downloadable? This can be quite easy if you have the original content files and the rights to publish it on the web. There are many tutorials on YouTube for authoring podcast content using free software like GarageBand and Audacity. I’d recommend illustrating the audio stops if possible, so that they are usable by people not on-site as well. You may also need to edit the content a little to remove references that are specific to the audio tour device, and perhaps add instructional content for using the downloadable or podcast version. If you publish the illustrated audio stops as videos (rather than ‘enhanced podcasts’), they can be reused on more devices and platforms as well.
What are the back end technical requirements for mobile solutions? See Titus Bicknell’s presentation for the workshop (coming soon).
What are the must have features in 1, 5, 10 year? How do you see mobile devices will change in 1, 5, 10 years? A good resource on future technologies for educational contexts is the Horizon Report. You can also subscribe to blogs like Mashable.com where many of these discussions get played out. It seems clear that cross-platform content management and the ability to support multiple platforms will be key to mobile for several years to come. I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to think beyond the 3 year horizon, but personalization, augmented reality, and enhanced social media and location-based applications seem pretty solidly in our future within that window.
Is an iPhone app the right place to start? It depends on your target audience. If you want to reach the still fairly small segment of your audience who use iPhones, then yes. By developing a web app (a web version of your content for mobile browsers and devices), you can expand to a slightly larger audience of smartphone users in general. But start with understanding your target audience(s) and the platforms they use.
How to deliver a single stream mobile application to all mobile platforms? There is no single way yet to publish to all mobile platforms at once, but a web app will reach the largest number of mobile smartphone devices.
How can we tailor a single mobile technology-based program for multiple audiences? The starting point is developing content in a modular way, thinking in terms of separable media (e.g. reusing audio and still images from video content), and recombining it according to different audience needs and program objectives. Centralized content management tools will help with this, but be prepared not to find a ‘one size fits all’ solution.
How far down the road do you see mobile giving taking over web giving – if ever? I don’t know if it will or if it’s important to worry about that. Audiences use both today, with recent stats showing that about 20% of Americans access the Internet through mobile devices regularly.
What is the easiest way to get our content mobile/online without IT support? Check out Titus Bicknell’s presentations on creating a mobile web app using WordPress, in the June 2009 Handheld Conference and the Feb 2010 Balboa Park Going Mobile workshops (coming soon).

Content design

What kinds of content should we focus on first? The content in the museum’s collections management system may well be low-hanging fruit and easily repurposed for mobile delivery (esp. via web apps); Tate Modern’s Collections Guide pilot in 2005 showed that visitors loved media-rich tours but would rather have simple text content than nothing, especially if the simple content provided broader coverage of the collection. I notice in a recent survey of French museums’ mobile solutions, the most common criticism is “not enough of the collection is available in the tour” (via Loic Tallon)
How can we make multiple applications work from the same content? Thinking of your content modularly, as separate assets (audio, still images, text from the audio script or labels, video, etc.) is a first step to being able to break down the content and recombine/reuse it on different platforms. But be sure that the application/platform and content work with your target audience(s) for the mobile program. One size will not fit all.
What is the state of mobile media and its interaction with users and UGC? Most social media apps now have a mobile version, so user-generated content is now a pervasive force on consumer mobile platforms.
How can I use the crowd to create content? There are many great examples and ways of doing this; some museum projects are in this podcast. Also see Clay Shirky on Institutions vs Collaboration for examples of other kinds of businesses working with and against user-generated content and community collaborations.
How do we find ‘good’ content in a UGC world? I’m fascinated by this question of quality at the moment (see my blog post of 21 Feb 2010). One answer is, as Chris Anderson paraphrased in his talk at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference, that the best person to curate any single object in your collection does not work for you, and moreover, you cannot find that person – but s/he can find you.’ A great example of this is the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection and the almost weekly contributions they get from researchers and subject experts that enhance the online information. See Seb Chan’s excellent blog post on this. Perhaps the mantra of the 21st century should be: ‘Put the data/content out there and they will come.’ I think excellent curation can also elicit the best stories and content from our audiences: rather like a great moderator in a panel discussion, or host at a party, a good curator makes everyone in the conversation look good.
Are we getting to any standards for mobile content? If I had to bet, I’d put my money on web standards, though Flash is still a bit up in the air due to the conflict with the iPhone platform. Thinking about content modularly will also give it a longer shelf life and make it more flexible for reuse in different contexts and on different platforms. At some point, though, content does have to be tailored or even originated for certain platforms and contexts. This is why content will and probably should be the biggest part of your mobile budget (over technology, for example).
How can we build a framework that encourages worthwhile content? I would look at good social media examples on all platforms for this. In addition to the Powerhouse Museum example cited above, also see Fill the Gap at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center, Tate Britain’s How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibition from 2007, and Brooklyn Museum’s Click! A crowd-curated exhibition from 2008 as a few more examples. But new projects of this nature are arising daily so there are lots of strategies and models to study. Please tell us your favorites here!

Interface design

UX and UI – how to make successful mobile interfaces?
What are the human interface design best practices for mobile platforms?

Experience design

How removed is this going to make us from the human experience? Hopefully not at all. The technology should be invisible; the focus is on the user experience and content/interpretation that supports that. After all, it is unlikely that many people will come to your museum (online or in person) just to “take the audio tour”; rather they are looking for a connection with your collections, exhibitions and ideas.
How can we leverage mobile best across multiple organizations, e.g. at Balboa Park? The answer could be a book but briefly, I’d go for an approach that gives centralized access to all mobile programs at all of Balboa Park’s organizations (a sort of portal/umbrella app), but also ensure that the mobile programs stand alone and can be accessed independently. Mobile is sort of anti-portal: the apps that seem to be most successful right now are those that do one or two things really well. This could change, but seems to be a winning logic at the moment. In addition, I think it’s worth investing in some standard interfaces and CMS facilities for standard functions. For example, there is no need for each Balboa Park organization to reinvent the audiotour wheel. What is required of a traditional audio tour interface (even if including images and video in an iPhone app) is pretty standard, and giving visitors a common interface will help make the technology invisible and easy to use. Innovate and differentiate the organizations at the points where that is helpful to the unique visitor experience at each organization – not just when it satisfy individual egos at the organizations, or some internal political goals. The aim should be economy of scale, but also to leverage the rich diversity of activities and perspectives at the Balboa Park organizations to give you the best of both worlds!

Business model

How do I track the ROI on mobile and social media solutions?
How do you maintain mobile solutions alongside existing requirements on a limited budget?
What is a low-maintenance solution for mobile tours that can be maintained in-house with limited staff? How can we incorporate mobile technologies with existing resources? Two good places to start are with ‘mobilizing’ your websites (making mobile versions of them), and beginning to publish as standard any lectures, guided tours, or similar content that can be recorded in audio and video and turned into webcasts and podcasts. These mobile do not require substantial additional skills or resources and should be feasible on a modest scale with a reallocation of time from the existing staff. For greater reach, also look at publishing everything you can in iTunes U, which draws more listeners for some museums’ podcasts than even iTunes!

Applications

How can we use mobile technical solutions to enhance the interest in conservancy?
How can we make a nature reserve exciting to a technology-savvy population?
What can mobile solutions do to enhance the user experience at airports?
How do we treasure map using mobile technologies, for teaching tools that engage audiences in arts, science, culture & sustainability?
How to create a park-wide mobile solution that addresses the collections and the spaces between them?
How to integrate a mobile app with live interpretation?
Mobile solutions for calls to action – gaming, ARGs?
Can we use the platform for mobile giving?
How can we develop membership through mobile strategies?
Can we supplement our docent-led walking tours with a mobile alternative? (I don’t want to put my people out of work.)
How best to apply mobile capabilities to complement areas with live interpretation?
How do we develop programs for visitors outside the museums?
How can we improve customer services at the airport?
How hard is it to develop virtual tours?
How can the Balboa Park Learning Institute help support mobile ideas and plans?

Audience development and visitor services

How to increase take up and visitation through mobile platforms?
How can we best use visitor services staff to enhance the mobile experience for visitors to increase visitation?

Marketing to internal and external clients

How to market mobile solutions?
How to sell mobile technology ideas to non-technical audiences and budget holders?
What is the best way to convince our director & board that mobile is worth investing in?

Metrics and evaluation

How do we rate the success of cell phone tours?
What types of things should be measured in order to maintain a successful mobile campaign?
How do I best evaluate the effectiveness of a mobile interpretative tool?

MuseumMobile Wiki

Media and Technology on the Go

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