Poverty Exhibit Process Post #9

Hi again!

During class on Monday, I took the role of doing all the final photoshop mock ups for the final crit presentation on Wednesday. I've taken an environmental graphics class, and we did a lot of mockups so I figured I probably knew what I was doing a little more than someone else would. So for the benefit of the whole class and to show off everyone's hard work, I thought it'd be best if I volunteered to do it all!

Here are all of the mockups I did:


1) Introduction Station

2) What It Means to Live in Poverty Content Area

This particular content area took me quite awhile to do. This is what the photo looked like before I photoshopped it:

3) Hard Choices Content Area

4) Health Content Area

The table that you see in the photo wasn't there in the original picture, I went ahead and made that myself. 

5) Who is Affected by Poverty Content Area

6) Children Content Area

The table you see in this photo also wasn't in the original photo, I created that table myself as well. 

Additionally to the mockups, I decided I would help present the presentation for final crit. The class had a bit of a mix up about who was presenting so I stepped up last minute the night before and volunteered to be a presenter. 

I presented the following:

-The Experience slides

-The first two content areas

-User Testing 

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #8

Hello there!

I got together with my content area (hard choices) in class the other day, and we brainstormed how to revise our Map your Budget interactive piece with the feedback we got from user testing. This is what we ended up with:

Users basically just confused about the directions on the piece, and they needed a little more direction during user testing to actually interact with the piece. So my content area and I decided to add more directions, point out more clearly how much each line is worth money-wise, and also we decided to make it horizontal so the whole thing was a little bigger and easier to read. 

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #7

Hey there!

Over the weekend, the experience designer did some user testing! We changed it a lot from the initial using testing idea that Lizzy and I worked together on. We printed off every content area on 11x17s, and then organized the content areas into clusters for the users. Here are the set of questions we gave users to answer:

1) Can you identify a specific flow to the space?
2) Did you learn things you didn't know or expect about poverty in Douglas County? If so, please name two things you learned.
3) Is there anything you were confused about?
4) Did you relate to the story?
5) What was successful?
6) What wasn't successful?

After user testing, I gathered up all the sheets, read over them, and wrote down all the concerns and issues that we need to fix. I wrote all this down in a word document, put it on the dropbox for the class to see, and also sent everyone an email to look over the feedback before monday.

So here is the feedback I got from the user testing:

Overall Feedback on Exhibit as a Whole:

• Is exhibit about Carmen specifically?
•  Needs image of Carmen      
• Needs a few images here and there to break up text
• Overall, exhibit communicates the bad situation Carmen is in. Is that the goal?
• Carmen is from Kansas City, Missouri, JACKSON County. The exhibit is about Douglas County. Can Douglas people identify with Jackson County? Could the example be fictional, change the story and names a little and just say, “based on a true story”? Or just leave out the location from Carman’s story
•  Introduction poster

Content Area Feedback:

• Hard Choices
• Map your Budget
•  Idea is good-need more clarification
• Needs better directions / better understanding of how to use the interactive element 
• This is a good element for younger visitors too, but needs clear instructions. Is this the final size?

•  Children in Poverty
•  Interactive element – needs better directions
• Confused about percentages and how they work interactively

• Who’s Affected Most
•  Circle maze needs direction
•  Do you start out and work your way in or vice versa?

Here are a couple photos of the process:

Overall, we got some great feedback. The information we got would be useful to put in the final presentation, and then address how we fixed the concerns that were voiced during the testing. 

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #6

Hello again!

So, after presenting all the three different ideas after fall break, my class decided to go with the Type direction, but to add the quick decision idea from the Game of Life direction.

My content area got together over the weekend and created all the content for our area. I created these two posters:

The activity is the map your budget idea that we came
up with awhile ago, but it would be hard to do on a hanging
poster. So we decided to make a poster like this
with instructions and then have the interactive piece
 right below the poster on a table.

So this is the decision poster. The users put their stickers
on either the gas side or the lunch money side, depending
on what they choose. 

Sarah worked on the title posters, and Gabby worked on the interactive map your budget piece.

So after class, we realized that we needed to think even more about how the map your budget interactive piece would work, and we came up with this:

Sarah did a really good job figuring out the math and measurements behind all this. Gabby and I helped develop it
within the design area (colors, fonts, etc), and then I printed and mounted it for user testing. 

Here it is mounted for user testing:

Poverty Exhibit Process #5

Hi again!

After we decided on one of the three directions. The experience designers all got together and talked about a way to go about user testing. Everyone came up with their own idea on how to user test, and then we all got together and discussed our ideas/ merged ideas into one.


Before class, Lizzie and I put together this idea for user testing (with everyone's ideas in mind):

This definitely isn't intended to be the final plan, but it's a good start,

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #4

Hey again!

So, after getting split up into three different teams before fall break, my group spent a lot of time trying to nail down a solid concept. We landed on the idea incorporating something similar to the game of Life throughout the exhibit. So here's how the exhibit works:

• people walk in and enter the first content area, which is "What does it mean to Live in Poverty?"
• in this content area, they take either 10, 20, or 30 pieces of paper- this paper acts as their currency throughout the exhibit
• After moving on from that first content area, people move to the next one. But in between the 1st content area and the 2nd, you are forced to make a quick decision such as paying for gas or rent for each month. So depending on what you pick, you have to give up 8 pieces of your paper for whatever choice you make
• After that, you move into the second content area which is "Hard Choices people in Poverty have to Make"
• This pattern of making a quick decision and then entering a content area is carried throughout the rest of the exhibit. 

For next class, I decided to sketch out the overall flow of the exhibit  because we didn't do that before we left as a group on Monday. So here is the rough sketch I came up with to make sense of everything our group talked about:

I also decided to briefly brainstorm a few ideas for what would go into each content area, and here's what I came up with:

I thought maybe splitting up each content area in to three panels would be helpful. So here I used the two side panels as photos and the back center panel as info and content. 

Even though we didn't end up using this stuff design wise, my group did end up using my idea of the three panels throughout all the content areas. 

So before we all split up over the weekend, we assigned tasks to each other. My task was to go to the library before break and take pictures. So I went and set it all up appropriately to photoshop in our designs. Here are the original photos:

Then after all the designs were done and sent to me, I photoshopped everything in: 

Our group met up after fall break and put together our presentation. Here are a few screenshots of that:

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #3

Hello again!

So during our design slam today, my content area (hard choices) and I came up with a fun interactive piece. It's about mapping our the budget of someone in poverty with just a piece of string. So the piece of string represents how much income you have, and you have to try to string together all of the payments you have to take care of as a person in poverty, which is pretty impossible to try to do. 

Here is a rough sketch of what we came up with in class: 

Sarah also created a more concrete version of this on Illustrator, but her computer crashed and we don't have that file. So a sketch will get the idea across!

Poverty Exhibit Process Post #2

After meeting with my content area group last week, I was assigned a new group. I'm in the experience design group, and over the weekend we all had to make a presentation about our target audience for the exhibit and answer the following questions:

- what will be the single quality that pervades the entire experience? 
- how will you work with the info architects and graphic designers to build up to that quality? 
- what will be the variations of the constituent parts — the speeding up or slowing down of the experience?
- what will be the doing (actions taken by participants) and the undergoing (the results of taking action, as in “i am undergoing stress”)? think of this also as “interaction” between people and objects, or even between people and people. 
- how will it come to a close or a consummation, rather than simply stopping?

Well brainstormed quite a bit during class, and here is a picture of the notes I took as we were brainstorming (they're a little and messy/ hard to read, but hey, at least they're notes!) :

As we were talking, we realized that our audience would really vary and we couldn't nail it down to one specific person. So we decided that each of us would create a different audience profile over the weekend. We also figured out 2 different experiences that our users would experience throughout the exhibit: following a family and using the exhibit as a grocery store. I created the google slides for our group to use, and here are the slides that I made and contributed to for our group's presentation: 

my audience profile 

Lizzie and I worked together on the following a family experience slides