Smithsonian Kiosk Design
In my Interactive Applications class, I was tasked to visit a museum virtual exhibit and its kiosks. This virtual field trip aims to teach me how a kiosk design would give the attendants the related information and space needed for the exhibit. Once I’ve completed the fieldwork and viewed the standards/trends used by these kiosks, I began working on my kiosk project. I chose the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for my virtual field trip and decided to create a kiosk for the V1 rockets exhibit on the second floor of the museum. The V-1 rockets were used by the Nazis in WWII against Allied forces, the sites were mainly stationed in France and used against the British.
Creating a 3D render of the site
I wanted to display my 3D artist skills by recreating the V-1 Rocket Launch Site in the 3D modeling program known as Blender. I had recently discovered how easily I could create 3D models by using Blender rather than other programs like the Cinema4D program taught at Maryville University. Seeing that some practice was necessary, I created the models for the V-1 rocket, catapult, and concrete barriers all on top of a grass-colored plane.
Creating the Kiosk Web Application
http://jkuhlman1.musites.org/Kiosk/deploy/
After creating the 3D render in Blender, I had created a working web application on a private server. It’s a series of simple click and zoom buttons that would move the user to each part of the Rocket Launch Site with a text box explaining what each button focuses the user on. There’s also a button to reset the view to overlook the entire Rocket Launch Site.
User Testing Report
After creating the working web application, I went to the Maryville University library to test this on a touchscreen TV device, with my users being three girls who were in the library at the time I needed to test the application. These are the user testing report results:
Danica
Maryville Student
- The text should be bigger
- Buttons are placed weirdly
- Works great
Molly
Maryville Student
- Hard to read the text
- Buttons could be more interesting
- Somewhat boring
Katie
Maryville Student
- Text is small
- Navigation is simple
- Buttons are too close together
My action plan is to make the text block bigger, space it further from the left side, space the buttons out and align them to the left side of the kiosk design.