Acoustiguide Smartour: Asian Art Museum

STAID INTERPRETATION, INTELLIGENT INTERFACE & SOME CLEVER AUDIENCE BUILDING FUNCTIONALITY

Released last week, this free app from the Asian Art Museum offers an enhanced audio tour of the Museum’s permanent collection with several ways to access content, on- or off-site, and social media integration. Although the content itself needs work, the access points to content demonstrate a deep understanding of the way people explore museums.  And perhaps even more interestingly, the producer, Acoustiguide, has incorporated email capture and on-sell opportunities in a clever way – something for all museums and museum app providers to consider.

UI demonstrates experience
Several simple and intuitive ways to access content serve different learning styles and user types. If you’re browsing in the Museum, you select content either through stop numbers on a keypad or maps with stop icons. At home, you can select exhibits from a numbered list with titles and images that describe and illustrate the area of the Museum’s collection you’re accessing.

One gripe: I’ve got an emerging pet peeve with museum apps in general – why two taps to content? I select a piece of content, a screen loads and then I need to press a play icon? Why not just load the content I selected?

Notwithstanding that, the UI design demonstrates a deep understanding of differing audience needs that underscores the value of Acoustiguide’s long history of providing mobile interpretation at museums and cultural sites in developing mobile/downloadable apps. The newbie mistakes are absent – its simple and intuitive, no bells and whistles to get in the way of my experience with the collection and zero text (no one wants to read what they can read in larger font on a website or a wall).

Content is a bit of a yawn…but better than nothing
The content is pretty uninspiring.  If memory serves me, its lifted wholesale from the Museum’s permanent collection audio guide with the addition of static images of the object associated with each audio message for those of us who are using the app outside the Museum, or as a visual confirmation that what I’m looking at is what I’m hearing about.

This content needs some enlivening. It could benefit from a fresher approach, some integration of images and video that serve the interpretive mission. But its not awful, its factually correct as far as I can determine, and it offers deeper insight into the Museum’s art and artifacts…And hey, something is better than nothing, right? Especially considering the lack of familiarity many of us have with Asian art, its themes and iconography.

Social media integration works – where will it lead?
Its simple and it works. I can FB, email or tweet from any object within the app after entering my username and password from any of these services. Auto-generated text says I’m exploring the Asian Art Museum but I was able to change it to my own choice of text. We’ll see if I get any feedback or response from the Museum, whether and how they leverage this capability.

Innovative, audience-building functionalities
The app producer, Acoustiguide, has done some clever and interesting things with this app that other museums and museum app providers should consider:

1.  Getting around the fact that Apple owns the data from anyone who downloads the app through the iTunes App Store, this app requests that you register with an email and password. Its not mandatory to use the app but the way its presented on the home page of the app with a pop up screen suggests that it is. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get content without registering, which annoyed me a bit until I remembered that ‘hey, I’m getting access to the Asian Art Museum collection for free. It’s the least I can do’. In the event, I was able to access the app content without registering but it wasn’t obvious. The Museum articulates reasons to register that are not terribly compelling but still, they do it, they try.  Even if only a small portion of app users register, its great for the Museum, giving them the ability to ping registrants with events, offers and updated information.

2. Acoustiguide markets its apps for other museums within this app directly. I’m not sure how many transactions it drives but it’s a clever idea to incorporate other apps. Who knows? You like this, then maybe you’ll like that. It doesn’t take up much space and opens the door to further transactions. Acoustiguide and its clients can only benefit from this integration, there’s no downside.

An app that’s smarter than its content
The app works – you can’t crash it. Its clever but not ‘smarty-pants’ clever in design and functionality but the content fails, like, seriously fails. I’d like to see a complete re-write of the interpretation, more use of interactive and multimedia formats, more dynamic audio interpretation – something that inspires through engaging storytelling, energy and spark, singular opinion. Something that excites me about this collection, something that energizes me to get on board, visit, donate, become a member. Something, anything.

But there are some real gems here in the way the way the UI design gets you to content in a variety of intuitive ways, and in the way Acoustiguide captures user data and promotes other apps.