1.3 System Goals
The system goals can be concisely defined as the following in regards to user context and
functionality:
Construction: The system should give the users the ability to take the data they collected
while in a museum and construct one of four visual narratives to represent their
experiences within the museum.
Reflection: The designed narrative visualizations should allow users to remember and
reflect upon what they experienced and learned within the museum, through them the
information is presented in a holistic fashion rather than as individual elements or purely
quantified data.
Communication: The designed narrative visualizations should be pleasant to look at and
clearly communicate what happened to the user in the museum. They should grant a clear
understanding of the person's chosen narrative within the museum.
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Sharing: The four narrative visualizations should go beyond just communicating their
contents clearly. They should be in a format that is easy to share with others, evokes
conversation, can be used to present the persons experiences, and overall foster a sense of
social interaction. The user should feel encouraged to share their experiences and have
others share with them.
1.4 Research Objectives and Methodology
The main research methodology of this study was to develop a prototype to use for
usability testing. Our approach included determining a set of goals through analysis of
users’ needs, designing a series of visualization styles and a system to offer them,
developing a prototype, usability testing, and finally evaluation of the system through
well-defined criteria. This approach was based upon previous research fully detailed in
Chapter 2: Literature Review, as well as HCI methodology outlined in Usability
Engineering by J. Nielsen [40] and Human computer Interaction by Dix et al. [41].
For this study two specific research questions were defined to be answered through
analysis of the results and evaluation. The research questions were chosen to explore how
successful the narrative visualizations would be in comparison to traditional methods and
to each other. They are the following:
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 and sequential) to the slideshow and traditional method?
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Concisely stated the research methodology is the following:
1. Identify visualization styles that match various exhibit types and purposes,
through literature review and museum visits
2. Design and develop a prototype that embodies the system goals and which can
perform tasks related to the user scenarios.
3. Perform usability testing on this prototype based on the usability criteria including
effectiveness, operability, flexibility, sociability and satisfaction
4. Evaluate the results in order to answer the research questions