How do you facilitate a visitor’s experience with a space so that the interactions both support and extend the visitor’s activities in effective and enjoyable ways?
Chicago Botanic Garden
The Chicago Botanic Garden opened more than 40 years ago as a beautiful place to visit, and it has matured into one of the world's great living museums and conservation science centers. In 2017, more than one million people visited the Garden's 27 gardens and four natural areas, uniquely situated on 385 acres on and around nine islands, with six miles of lake shoreline. The Garden also has a renowned Bonsai Collection.
The Solution
The system will aim to simplify the experience and reduce frustrations for visitors by providing easily accessible information about the Garden. Presently, information can be difficult to access; static maps do not appropriately represent the size of the Garden or allow visitors to focus on specific parts of the garden, group tours can be costly and time consuming, visitors may be unfamiliar with surrounding suburbs for places to stop and there isn’t a strong online community to share the experience.
Overview
Role: UX Researcher
Duration: 10 Weeks
Tools: InDesign (Personas, Navigation Map, Journey Map), draw.io (Conceptual Model Diagram), Stormboard ( Insights and Insight Clusters), Optimal Workshop (card sort), Paper & Pen (Contextual Inquiry, Prototypes), MyBalsamiq (Prototype), Excel (User Testing and Final Analysis)
Methods: Contextual Inquiry, researched-based personas, prototyping, and evaluation
Process
Contextual Inquiry
Using the screening questions outlined in the inquiry protocol, potential subjects were chosen and interviewed. Each team member made it a priority to seek out one planning subject and one impromptu subject. Team members also discussed seeking diverse subjects with regard to age, education, employment, and cultural affinity in order to represent a sufficiently diversity subject pool. When locating potential subjects, team members did their best to accommodate the discussed requirements within the timeline of the project. The team would have preferred a larger subject pool which would have potentially lead to a more diverse group of subjects.
Subjects were initially chosen by individual team members. The team made their best effort to reach subjects with experience visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden or a similar experience. We would have preferred to observe subjects in action at the Garden but given the time constraints of the project, this was not possible. We created and asked questions that would engage the subjects in discussion about their thought process when planning a day trip to a similar destination. Two of our subjects had visited the Garden and were able to give direct feedback on how they would go about visiting for a second time.
Target users
1. Planning Visitor - A person that enjoys planning out details of a day trip a few days prior to the event. They have a specific goal in mind once they get to their destination.
2. Impromptu Visitor - A person that enjoys being spontaneous and not plan every detail of a day trip. They spend more time exploring once they arrive at their destination.
Goal
Seek to help planning and impromptu visitors seek a more informative, interactive and simplified visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden. The goal is to provide visitors with the ability to navigate to the Garden, discover horticulture, flora and habitats, and reminisce about their experience. Visitors will be able to locate the most popular exhibits or follow guided tours of the areas that are of personal interest, receive detailed information and assistance from Botanic Garden Staff as well as current and previous visitors.
Insights:
Users wanted three ways to enjoy their experience
[1] Retrieve garden information
[2] Customize an activity
[3] Reflect on their trip
“I sometimes make a list of the areas we want to see, but then it is hard to find them once we are there. If I could have just saved the maps I had seen online before we came, it would have been a lot easier.”
“We don’t mind tours, but we like to have to option to choose how much time we spendtouring and how much time we spend on our own.”
“We missed some neat events that were going on just because we lost track of time and didn’t get to the right area in time. It would have been nice to get an alert on my phone prior to the start of these things.”
Design-Informing Models
Personas | Modeled from contextual inquiry results,
Alice Helianthus | Planning Persona
Alice is a Master Gardener and is volunteering to take a group from her retirement community to the Chicago Botanic Garden in hopes of inspiring gardening within the community center.
Chad Cooper | Impromptu Persona
Chad is your typical weekend warrior. Between his full-time job and evening classes, Chad has little time during the week to socialize and does as much as possible on the weekends. Chad typically doesn’t have time to research his trips, nor does he want to.
Journey Map
The team chose the persona that faces the most challenging journey and one that is likely to have the most emotional reaction to decisions and interactions with the system.
Conceptual Model Diagram | A visual representation of the activity-related concepts defined in our contextual inquiry and the relationships among them
Conceptual Design | Framing the Product Vision
What is the system name?
The Garden Planner | An interactive experience planner for visitors to the Chicago Botanic Garden
Who are the system users?
The Garden Planner will be used by people visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden.
What will the system do?
The Garden Planner will give users three ways to enjoy their experience retrieve garden information, customize an activity, reflect on their trip. The overall system acts as a Travel Tips and Checklist companion. The planner aims to provide easy access to facts about the Garden to reduce the stress of planning and preparation. The system will maximize visitor’s time spent by providing timely alerts and directions to points of interest within the garden. For group tours that have visitors with different needs, the system can adjust to show guest services relevant to a group’s preferences. The system can be utilized as a sharable journal that records the entire Garden visiting experience.
What problem(s) will the system solve?
The system will simplify the experience and reduce frustrations for visitors by providing easily accessible information about the Garden. Presently, information can be difficult to access; static maps do not appropriately represent the size of the Garden or allow visitors to focus on specific parts of the garden, group tours can be costly and time consuming, visitors may be unfamiliar with surrounding suburbs for places to stop and there isn’t a strong online community to share the experience. What is the design vision and what are the emotional impact goals? The Garden Planner draws on the experience of visitor’s complicated and often time consuming effort of planning a trip. The goal of the system is simplicity of access to realtime information on paths, directions, amenities, concessions, parking, and open hours. By providing visitors with effortless access to Garden information, visitors can experience a full sensory experience through exercise, communication, and discovery. As a companion guide with a customized itinerary, the user can attend to their individual needs and the needs of their companions. The focus of the system is to bring the visitor to the park, relieve the stress of scheduling, exploring botany, viewing exhibits, and assembling the pieces of their visit into a complementary keepsake of the Garden.
Card Sort
The card sort helped get the team organized and initiate the navigation map but what we found surprising is that we ended up completing several iterations of the map. The team needed to see the the structure of the map in order to make decisions about how to better organized the interface.
Navigation Map
Bridging the conceptual process with the design process.
Wireframe
We converged all the pieces of task scenarios, personas, navigation map and card sort into a tangible artifact. During the ideation phase, the team used draw.io as its primary tool. The templates help iterate a few sketches before we settled on a viable version. The visual representation of the menu helped us frame an initial work flow for our two personas. We learned that debating the elements of the wireframe and its connection to the navigation map help establish an introductory look of the app. More important, we believe the wireframe will start a dynamic dialogue between designer and user and this will serve as a basis for our prototype.
Prototype and Evaluation
The low-fidelity prototype links all the design process into a tangible object with interactive elements. This visual portrayal of our ideas required testing with subjects. This phase in the design process further brought to light problems that can only materialize in the hands of the user. For example, the addition of buttons for fluid navigation and clear map elements to outline its capabilities were necessary design changes. We completed a usability evaluation with eight participants/users and recorded their time on task, number of errors, type of errors, and where assistance was requested.
Key Research Insights
Ideally, we would utilize the insights gained below and continue to iterate our design. By quickly testing and retesting, we would be able to generate new ideas and get the best possible results.
Change the name from ‘Build Your Own Tour’ to ‘Customized Tours’ so that there is less perceived work to be done in creating a tour by using that option instead of ‘Suggested Tours’.
Based on the first subject’s experience testing our prototype, we changed the names of the ‘Tour Selections’ from generic (A, B, C) to specific (Bright Gardens, Wonderland Encounter, Lakeside Gardens) for our subsequent testing.
The ‘Tour Settings’ page design was made to accommodate myBalsamiq’s functional abilities. We discussed having scroll options for each of the setting options all on the same page. This way the users can have visual access to their settings on one page before generating their own tour.
We would have a true back button that allows users to recover quickly from any errors in the Customized Tour process rather than returning directly to the main menu after each error.
Based on a subject’s suggestion we would change the directive ‘Save and Recall Information’ on the My Garden page to ‘Save and Retrieve Information’ for more clarity of function.
As this was a very minimal low-fidelity prototype, we would add design aspects such as images, font changes, and a color scheme while still retaining the minimalist quality.
As suggested by two subjects, a more descriptive label for the ‘Map It’ button such as ‘Get Directions’ would better inform users that the button would create a route to a point of interest.
In the prototype we created a checklist for the points of interest due to the limited function of myBalsamiq. In the design phase we would prefer to have the checklist items as a scrollable feature in the interactive map.
Project Impact
The Garden Planner draws on the experience of visitor’s complicated and often time-consuming effort of planning a trip. The goal of the system is simplicity of access to realtime information on paths, directions, amenities, concessions, parking, and open hours. By providing visitors with effortless access to Garden information, visitors can experience a full sensory experience through exercise, communication, and discovery. As a companion guide with a customized itinerary, the user can attend to their individual needs and the needs of their companions. The focus of the system is to bring the visitor to the park, relieve the stress of scheduling, exploring botany, viewing exhibits, and assembling the pieces of their visit into a complementary keepsake of the Garden.