Prototyping and user testing ‘The Lost Map of Wonderland’

User testing underway in Future Lab at ACMI

On 5 April our next Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition, Wonderland opens. The exhibition ‘will celebrate the screen history of Lewis Carroll’s timeless stories — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There — in an entirely original experiential exhibition. Combining rarely seen objects and interactive experiences, Wonderland explores how dozens of screen adaptations have used the magic of film craft, animation, video games, special effects and new technology to make the impossible possible’.

Wonderland exhibition trailer

Wonderland is different to anything we have done before at ACMI. It is designed to be an immersive and beautiful experience transporting visitors to another world. On arrival at the exhibition visitors receive the Lost Map of Wonderland.

The map is a piece of ‘technology-enhanced paper’ to take around the exhibition identifying objects and unlocking surprises as you go. Not all the maps are the same — different characters take visitors on different journeys. Much as Alice is rewarded for her curiosity, so will visitors be.

We worked with Sandpit who are based in ACMI X to help us deliver this. It extends some of the ideas they had explored in the Arts Centre Melbourne’s temporary experience The Story of Lamp.

The underlying technology for the Lost Map of Wonderland are a series of NFC readers dotted through the exhibition. Each map that visitors receive is embedded with a NFC tag. At various points throughout the exhibition visitors are asked to place their map down on a plinth that hides the reader. This physical interaction triggers content that is specific to each version of the map — if your map is the White Rabbit’s you see the White Rabbit and so on.

Testing how visitors use the map

Because it’s not an ‘obvious’ way of using a map, we wanted to make sure the way this had been designed made sense to visitors. In order to test our assumptions, we brought some groups of visitors into our Future Lab to do some testing.

The NFC readers are now in their third technical prototype and so in order to do audience testing we housed them in a couple of cardboard boxes with the appropriate map symbol pasted to the top. The readers were then connected via HDMI to a couple of screens which displayed the dummy content when triggered.

Dan from Sandpit briefing visitors before they were asked to test our prototype in our Future Lab test space

Dan from Sandpit briefed the visitors with a little about the exhibition and then the baseline script for onboarding visitors to the map — what it is for and how to use it.

Our visitors testing our cheap and dirty prototype

Then visitors were asked to follow the instructions from the briefing and we showed them the prototypes of the plinth.

What we learnt

• Telling visitors to look for a symbol to identify the plinth AND asking them to complete the image of Alice with the map and the plinth is too much information. We need to simplify this and not worry about the symbols.
• The terms “this side up” and “map closed” are key so that visitors know how to have the map ‘ready’ for the plinth.
• It is important to find language describing the map as a key to more things if you’re curious enough but not absolutely essential to your experience — we want visitors to use the map but they need to understand they can still go through and have a great experience without it.

Testing the collage activity

The Lost Map is not only for navigating and unlocking surprises in the exhibition. In one of the rooms, The Queen’s Croquet Garden there will be an activity for visitors to get crafty! Using fun and quirky Wonderland-inspired stickers visitors will create their own card soldier using the back of the map. The team at Mosster Studios came up with this activity for which there is a personalised aspect which is also take-home and shareable.

Mosster and ACMI wanted to know if visitors would enjoy the activity at its current level of complexity; if the instructions they came up with were clear (keeping in mind there will also be a staff member in the room to assist); and how long the activity took to complete.

Instructions to test with visitors

What we learnt

• There was a lot of enjoyment and engagement on the proposed activity among all the different ages of participants, especially with cutting and creation of compositions.
• People were able to follow visual instructions (with no words).
• Only 6 people out of 24 positioned some of the stickers outside of the correct space on the card. This would have negative implications for the digital part of the experience — but not necessarily for the analogue version.
• The use of the proposed Tenniel drawings for collage making was very creative and unique including the use of the patterns (even without any Alice in Wonderland context in the room). There was only one case of a repeated composition.
• Most people wanted to take their compositions home with them.
• Most people finished the activity within 10 to 15 minutes which is may be too long for desired visitor throughput.

A group of visitors testing the activity with Mei and Anglea from Mosster Studios observing

Problems

• People, especially young children found it difficult to peel off the stickers.
• The visual instructions had too many steps to follow.
• There were a lot of wastage from the stickers.

Solutions

• For the visual instructions design, we will simplify communications by reducing the number of steps. We will also add words and arrows/numbers to each of the steps so it’s easier for people to understand.
• Sticker backing paper needs to have tighter scoring. So it makes it easier to peel.
• To reduce the amount of wastage, we are changing the format of the sticker sheet from A5 to A6.
• The sticker sheets are going to be placed in one single cupboard in piles randomly so people can collect 3 sticker sheets each to make their compositions.

What’s next?

Following this testing we are further refining the script to onboard visitors to the map. We workshopped it with a group of our colleagues from Visitor Services as it needs to be succinct in order to get 30 people through every 5 minutes. We want to make visitors feel that we’re not rushing them, while giving them the vital information and leaving them intrigued and excited about what’s ahead.

We’ve got lots of other testing ideas up our sleeves and will continue to post about what we’re doing and learning. All this is really helpful as we go into the much larger redevelopment of ACMI as a whole . . .

Tickets to Wonderland are now on sale so please come along, it will be a very special exhibition.