OVERVIEW
They asked us to create a standard digital guestbook.
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We took the opportunity to design an emotional experience that connected real people.
A museum that inspires people to take action and change the world.
The Gates Discovery Center is a free interactive museum that highlights the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization fighting to improve people’s health and end poverty.
Guestbook entries that ended up in the trash.
Visitors were ignoring the museum’s pen-and-paper guestbook because it was difficult to find. When visitors did use the guestbook, the pages wound up in the garbage. As a result, the Discovery Center had no way to follow up with visitors to their museum.
It was a straightforward problem in need of a meaningful solution.
The Discovery Center asked for a digital version of their underused pen-and-paper guestbook. Together with a team of 5 other students from the School of Visual Concepts, we solved a problem they didn’t know they had in just 10 weeks.
THE BRIEF
Design a guestbook for the Gates Discovery Center that...
1.
Captures visitor comments and feedback.
2.
Encourages visitors to sign up for the Gates Foundation Newsletter.
THE CONCEPT
We began with three hypotheses.
1.
Some visitors feel a personal connection with the people and projects featured in the Discovery Center.
2.
The museum doesn’t offer visitors a way to communicate with people working on the projects they feel connected to.
3.
Visitors who feel a personal connection are likely to want follow-up communication from the Gates Foundation.
Here’s how we validated them.
1. Some visitors feel a personal connection with the people and projects featured in the Discovery Center.
We began by sorting old guestbook entries into categories. We found that visitors expressed four sentiments in their entries:
I was Here
I was Moved
I was Inspired
I have Feedback.
We developed a persona for each of the four sentiments. We discovered that the “Moved” and “Inspired” personas felt personally connected to the people and projects they learned about in the museum.
2. The museum doesn’t offer visitors a way to communicate with people working on the projects they feel connected to.
An audit of the interactive exhibits in the museum revealed there was no opportunity for visitors to connect with changemakers (the people working on the projects that they’d learned about). Visitors could only share their stories with the Gates Foundation, or with other visitors.
We conducted in-person interviews with visitors who matched our target personas to see if they had a desire to connect with changemakers. We asked them the following question:
On a scale of 1-5, with 1 being Not Interested and 5 being Very Interested, how interested would you be in writing a short comment directly to the people in the field doing the work that you learned about today?
Visitors expressed a desire to connect directly with changemakers with an average response of 3.75 out of 5.
3. Visitors who feel a personal connection are likely to want follow-up communication from the Gates Foundation.
We also asked the visitors we interviewed about their interest in receiving follow-up communications like this:
On a scale of 1-5, with 1 being Not Interested and 5 being Very Interested, how interested are you in receiving follow-up communications from the Gates Foundation about issues you’re interested in?
We discovered a strong correlation between the answers to our questions, as seen below.
We had validated our hypotheses.
1.
We knew which visitors we were designing for.
2.
We knew they wanted to connect with changemakers.
3.
We knew they had an interest in signing up for the newsletter.
So we asked ourselves:
How might we provide a platform for Discovery Center visitors to share their feelings directly with changemakers?
And we started thinking about postcards.
A postcard contains a short message. It’s written to someone who’s important to the sender. Receiving a postcard is meaningful and memorable.
It became clear that sending physical postcards would be too complicated.
But what if visitors sent messages to changemakers digitally?
We realized that going digital had benefits.
Digital messages are waste free. Interfaces can be translated into multiple languages for international visitors.
Eureka.
How might we provide a platform for Discovery Center visitors to share their feelings directly with changemakers?
Design an interactive digital kiosk that…
1.
Prompts visitors to write a personal message to one of six pre-selected changemakers.
2.
Encourages visitors to sign up for the Gates Foundation newsletter.
It was time to start designing.
Everything was flowing.
A basic user flow came together quickly. We made a few changes, decided on the most important things to test, and finalized the flow.
And we were moving quickly.
We were nearing the midway point of our 10-week schedule. Creating wireframes in a shared Figma file allowed for rapid iteration and the ability to see each other’s work immediately.
We gave the prototype a quick rotation, then took it for a spin.
A horizontal orientation wouldn’t leave much space for an onscreen keyboard, so we decided to move to a vertical orientation before testing it.
USER TESTING
Here’s what we needed to know.
1.
