Kiosk User Testing

Introduction:

Recently, I have been working on an interactive kiosk design. This kiosk is for the St. Louis Art Museum and would be with their American Art Gallery. The goal of the kiosk would be to teach guests more about the important process of restoring old paintings. The restoration process is a delicate balance between craftsmanship and chemistry. The focused age group for this kiosk would be in the range of 10–18 years old. While the information would be interesting for all ages, the game has been simplified in order to cater to younger audiences. Without this, the paintings that so many art enthusiasts enjoy would not exist, and even if they did, they would likely be in such disrepair that they would not be able to be enjoyed properly. Due to this, proper restoration techniques are the cornerstone of any historic fine arts exhibit.

Users:

• Quinton, Male, Physical Therapy Major
• Dawn, Female, Sales Representative
• Ronnie, Female, Graphic Design Major
• Brian, Male, Business Owner
• Luke, Male, International Business Major

Considering that feedback can often be bias, it is best to find outside parties that can give unsolicited feedback when testing a design. This feedback is vital to the design process because without it, a designer has no confirmation when it comes to whether or not their design choices were correct. For this test, I found various individuals that could help give me an insight on any details that i may have missed. The majority of these testers had zero design experience, this was intentional because I wanted to simulate an average user. The single design major was brought into the test in order to comment on various design choices that could have been adjusted like the font or the color scheme. Together, these testers gave me a wealth of information that will help me to greatly improve the overall experience of the design.

Insights:

User testing offers a wide array of useful information that can help guide a designer’s decisions later on in the design process. Designers often make certain assumptions that can either help the design or hurt it. These assumptions that hurt the design are what user testing is for. While the assumptions that may help the design are able to be tested and can be confirmed whether or not they truly do help the design or not. For example, I am aware of all of the steps that it takes to complete the restorations so I do not need confirmation when deciding whether or not the correct material was made, but someone that has no experience with the subject may need some sort of extra confirmation that they have made the correct choice. Some of the insights that I gained from these tests were:

1. Increase the contrast/attention given to the text.
2. Switch backgrounds in order to make the painting seem more like it is on a table.
3. Add another feature that ensures the user that they have made the correct choice when they drop the object.
4. Possibly adjust color palate a bit to make the design more interesting.
5. Add some sort of “refresh” or “restart” button to make the overall experience a bit smoother.

Re-Design:

Looking into the future, I will take these various insights that I have gained from the testing and incorporate them into the design in order to improve upon it. The first issue that I will address is that the background does not read like a floor, and instead reads more like a wall. This is an issue that I would like to address due to the fact that paintings are restored while laying flat on their backs, so if the tools appear to be on the wall then that is a bit of an issue. The next thing I would like to fix is the overall legibility of the text on the screen. While the light background around the text and images did help a bit, I would like to improve the contrast a bit more. Little touches such as these are what can determine whether or not a design is successful and that is why user testing is such a vital part of the design process.