Chapter 8: Conclusion and Future Work
This research sought to evaluate several different designs and implementations of visual
narratives through the development of a prototype that would enable a user to visit a
virtual museum, and create and share a narrative visualization of their experiences.
The main contributions of this study are:
1. Identification and design of four narrative visualization styles.
2. Design of a prototype museum system
3. Classifying Exhibits Types
4. Usability testing of four different narrative visualization schemes
The research was conducted primarily with the intent to explore the two research
questions:
Question 1: Would each of the four narrative visualizations succeed at conveying
its content in a satisfactory manner to the users?
Question 2: Would the users prefer the 'new' narrative visualizations (categorical,
dramatic, sequential) to the slideshow and traditional method?
It sought to do this though the design of narrative visualizations which were formed after
a literature review of topics including Information Visualization, Narrative in Digital
Media, and Narrative Visualization.
These narrative visualizations would enable the user to construct a visual narrative out of
all the data that they had collected on their museum visit. They could present their visual
narrative to friends and family members and it would serve as a presentation and storage
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tool that would allow the user and others to share and reflect on what they experienced. A
prototype was developed to embody these narrative visualizations and usability testing
was carried out on the prototype, with a variety of metrics used to determine how well the
narrative visualizations succeeded at their core goals. The evaluation criteria included
effectiveness, operability, flexibility, sociability and satisfaction. The evaluation results
were used to answer the research questions.
Overall, the results from the user study conducted show that narrative visualizations met
their core goals of construction, sharing, communication, and reflecting. They were
successful at meeting their evaluation criteria in a positive manner; they were seen as
effective tools that were easy to use and operate. The first question was answered
positively in this manner where each visualization preformed well with its theme
understood by the participants and each seen as excelling in different contexts.
Additionally users desired for there to be greater customization and data types present in
the narrative visualizations.
The four individual themes that the participants could choose from where well received
however some were preferred over others. The 'new' visual narratives (categorical,
sequential, dramatic) were ranked higher than the more traditional methods (Slideshow,
pictures in a folder). The second research question was also answered positively in this
manner.
Further efforts can be considered for this project in future. The first and probably the
most important one is to develop a new version that works on a mobile device and can be
deployed and tested in a real museum. While, sharing and organizing data can be done on
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a PC and at home, actual visit and data collection should happen on site and requires a
more finalized design to be implemented via a mobile application that is used in real
museums.
Future developments should also include a greater variety of data types such as audio and
video, in the narrative visualizations. The results of this study indicate that participants
found narrative visualizations to be effective tools that were easy to use and that they
succeeded at conveying experiences with different themes. Additional and more rigorous
testing could be performed on these themes, either in conjunction with the ones presented
here or as separate tests.
Last but not least, more usability tests including a wider range and larger number of
participants, and also different exhibit/museum types will help identifying the advantages
and disadvantages of the proposed narrative visualization.