Before the pandemic, Fallen Star was an extremely popular and experiential art exhibit where students could walk through the front yard and one room house to learn about the Do Ho Suh’s experience as a Korean man living in America. Now it is closed: leaving many students admiring it from afar. There must be a way to help students experience Fallen Star without breaking in.
Contributions: As part of a team of five, our group worked jointly in the design process. I worked on both the figma prototype and the physical aspect of the kiosk.
The University of California, San Diego has a simple virtual tour of the Fallen Star exhibit if you do some digging. However, this website is too hard to find and it does not include additional information about the art piece.
In our interviews, we found concurrently that students were largely unaware of the online tour and often wanted to learn more about Fallen Star.
Furthermore, the artists intent was to have a tour guide tell you about the piece as you experience it.
We additionally wanted to create an appointment booking site to help students access the exhibit quickly after it reopens.
To solve the problems of the existing virtual tour, we wanted to help users experience Fallen star personally and authentically by facilitating an informative virtual tour, and an appointment booking site all in one place.
Kiosks:
- Advertise themselves
- Have lots of room for branding
- Facilitate immersive large screen interactions
- Consolidate Fallen Star related services
After looking at the problems from many perspectives and speaking to students, we learned that our kiosk should be:
- Placed outside and on the ground floor of the building that Fallen Star rests on.
- Quick to use as students don't have much time.
- Visually Interesting to grab limited attention.
- Informational because interviewees were largely interested to learn more about Fallen Star.
We also learned that students were about equally interested in the virtual tour and the appointment booking functionality. Reflecting this, our UI gave equal visual priority to both features.
Our kiosk featured a:
- Virtual tour
- Appointment center
- Gallery of the Stuart Collection
- Bio of the artist
In user testing, the virtual tour experience was a primary pain-point with its confusing controls. To help people out, we added a short tutorial and changed the wording of our labels. For example, we renamed buttons to describe their real functions (e.g. "home" changed to "exit tour")
Our physical Kiosk has these features:
- A Fallen Star replica to interest passing students
- A transparent pamphlet holder on the left side showcasing other art exhibits in the area.
- Colorful branding on the sides to grab attention. The cut-outs resemble different art pieces on University of California, San Diego's campus.
1. Our Home Screen (center) visually prioritizes the two most popular features over the two less popular ones.
2. In more tests, we also found that by placing these four features on the Home Screen, users could easily navigate to each key feature.
3. We felt that users would often have extremely unique paths or workflows. Acknowledging this, we tried to facilitate an experience where a user would navigate to and from the Home Screen often rather than go down an expected route.
4. With such an important Home Screen, we made sure that users could always return to the Home Screen by clicking a consistently placed "home" button in the top left.
All in all, our final interface prioritized consistency over narrowly designing for a few workflows. During our open showcase, it was wonderful to see other students immerse themselves in touring this blue house.
