Dior Gardens

This project applies design thinking and user-centred methods to ensure that the design of the product meets the needs of the users and addresses the problems that exist in current online experiences.

The final unity product has been developed for a 1440x900px screen.

UX researchers have explored the advantages of VR in museums, concerning cutting-edge content delivery, user experience and visitor interaction. The analysis of the advantages of VR has certainly brought up new opportunities for users, however many researches tend to focus more on these advantages, overlooking the limitations that have arisen from adapting the VR technology to the museum environments.

Explore the opportunities and limitations of VR for user experience in online museums.

Personal development on creating interactive experiences and 3D models

I conducted research on how virtual reality enhances user experience in off-set museums, to make sure that my project kept up to the standards set by other designers. I also researched about the limitations of VR for UX in off-set experiences, to discover the pain points for online museums and address them.

3d models of off-set museums cannot evoke emotions for users in the same way that tangible artefacts do

When an object is being reconstructed as a 3D model and digital creators do not have a clear image o fits full structure, it stands to reason that many of its features will be presented falsely to the audience. In this case, the model will not be used as a presentation of the past, rather than the creator’s subjective way of perceiving it. This drawback might not affect users instantly, however, if the audience is well educated about the collection and notice a low level of accuracy, it could potentially ruin the user experience.

Users often enjoy autonomy, but usually after 10 minutes the experience doesn’t keep them engaged enough and they end up leaving the tour.

Offering too much autonomy by allowing making choices independently, could lead users out of action. In a virtual environment, directions are usually not clear enough which frustrates users.

The two virtual exhibitions that affected the way I approached my project were the VR Fashion Innovation Centre, an online indoor exhibition, displaying clothing from previous centuries and the Banská Štiavnica Museum Virtual Tour, which is an on-set museum, presenting the history of the old town. I went on and analysed the two examples by focusing on the artwork’s visual elements, such as color, line, texture, and scale. I also tried to recognise and understand the choices of the artists who made the artwork, representing people, events, situations and so on.

Based on the above visual analysis of the two examples, my goal was to give as much attention to detail as possible, to the features of both the environment and the artefacts, in order to create a realistic experience for my users.

The fashion museum example lacks the opportunity of discovery, however, in the outdoor VR museum, the users are able to walk through the outdoor environment with no strict guidance and explore the town. It is important for an exhibition to find ways to further the potential for exploration in order to maintain the users’ curiosity and focus.

Thus, I also wished to provide the audience with an “exploring” experience, the same way that physical museums do. In order to do that, I would try not to include any strict guidelines or directions in the VR tour, so visitors could explore the environment and search for the artefacts.

Last but not least, it was important for me to enable users to interact with the artefacts in order to feel that this off-set experience provides them with a different set of opportunities than a physical one. I also planned to include a short manual in the menu to help visitors with interacting with the VR museum.

I created two user personas (Figure 1), in order to present some of the data collected during my secondary research. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, user personas are fictitious yet realistic representations of the target audience. According to the Museums Audience Report of 2018, museums attract higher proportions of 25-44 year olds than any other art form. Furthermore, exhibitions tend to attract more female than male visitors. Based on this report, my target audience were females, between ages 25 and 45, who love fashion. Some of them acquire basic technological skills, while other are “Digital Natives”. Digital native is a term found by Marc Prensky to describe a group of people who are comfortable with technology from an early age and consider technology to be a necessary part of their lives.

In order to address the aforementioned user needs, I built upon the museum model of Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson. The below figure shows the final wireframe which displays the user flow and environment plan that my prototype would build upon.

As mentioned before, the garden was designed based on the real-life garden of Grandville, the family house of Christian Dior. It was not possible to recreate the entire garden, especially since I did not have the ground plan. However, the space of the exhibition needed to be small as I did not want to risk visitors getting lost and leaving the experience.Therefore, I picked one of the most beautiful spots of the garden, which also has a view of the sea and added a few touches of my own to design the areas that I did not have a clear view of.

In this stage, I performed tests with four users, in order to evaluate the methods and techniques chosen to solve the user problems that were identified during my research. All five participants were women. Two of them were aged 23 and 27, while the other two were30 and 35. The techniques I chose to test the product with the five users were Naturalistic Observation and Unstructured Interviews. I felt that a survey or an interview with preset questions would limit the freedom of the respondents, thus I preferred to gather insight from a smaller number of users, who would provide me with constructive feedback. During the naturalistic observation I spent time with the user and observed their behavior while they were testing the product. I recorded their interactions at the same time in order to conduct an interview with them, based on my observations, later on.

All users found the idea of a virtual garden uncommon and exciting.

6 out of 8 users commented that this museum provided them with an exploring experience.

Testers of ages 23 to 30 found it easier to navigate in the environment and identify the artefacts.

After locating the artefacts and interacting with them, 5 out of 8 users thought that they completed a task and paid no attention to the information about that exhibit. It seems that providing the users with a clear direction at the starting point of the experience like “find the four artefacts”, made them believe that the primary goal of the experience is to find the “hidden objects” in the space, rather than educating themselves about the collection.

Younger participants were the ones who criticised my work the most, as they were comparing the 3D artefacts with the 2D images that were displayed during the tour.

Before I added the directions panel at the entrance of the exhibition, two of the first four participants who tested the product were not sure what the purpose of the experience was.

Due to time constrains the users’ need of socializing in virtual museums was not addressed via this product. In future development of the project, priority would be given to enabling visitors to share their thoughts and feelings about the artwork from the online environment. Furthermore, as a next step, users should be able to rotate the objects to view all of their perspectives instead of walking around them to view the back and side parts. I chose to not include this feature in this stage of the project, since I felt that it would confuse the users while experiencing the tour. Lastly, the addition of sound could enhance the user experience. Apart from soundeffects of the graden, voiceovers could also be incorporated in the experience. Voiceovers could make the user interaction easier, by allowing creators to educate their audience while interacting with the artefacts and exploring the environment.