The American Museum of Natural History has a series of apps attached to it. Among them you have Dinosaurs Iphone App, Creatures of Light, Pterosaurs: The Card Game, MicroRangers, Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs, The Power of Poison: Be a Detective, Bernard Family Hall of the North American Mammals, and Beyond Planet Earth. You can check them out on this link http://www.amnh.org/apps. However, here I’m specifically reviewing the app called Explorer. The Explorer is an app supported by Bloomberg Philantropies, founded by the ex-mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. The app has the main objective of presenting the museum to the largest possible amount of people in the world. In this sense, the user has two options of function: one with the user browsing at the museum and other with the user browsing outside.
Yes, the app brings you a experience of living the museum even if you are far away from it. As you open the app you have the possibility of scrolling through a list of tens of exhibits. Clicking in one of the exhibits of the list, you are able to receive an explanation about the subjects in text, pictures, videos, and audio. If you click in another exhibit you might find questions related to a picture showed to you and you can guess the right answer. The design is entirely navigable and user-focused as you can interact with the app all the time. Every picture, video or audio are loaded with a short text explaining itself. If you are inside the museum and you have the Bluetooth on, the app can guide you towards all the exhibits, paintings, pictures, sculptures or whatever that are right close to you or around you. In this section, you also have the option of skipping the ticket line on the museum and purchase your ticket online. Beside that section, the Explorer contains a map that shows where everything is located inside the museum, such as food court, restrooms, museum stores, and all the exits. The menu button on the top left of the screen shows suggestions on how organize a future visit.
The great stuff with the Explorer lies on providing a sense of direction. Now you ask me, how the app helps the reader organize its future visit, Yuri? Making more clear to the reader, as the visitor wanders through the app, the visitor has the option of marking the exhibits that are more interesting by liking it as people like a Facebook status. As the user collects several likes, the app starts giving you suggestions of other exhibits and cool things to check out – and shows where these exhibits are located. I believe that if there is something this app could improve is expanding its interactiveness. Maybe even dividing the app’s functionality according to the age of the user in order to provide suggestions that are more related to kids than to adults, for example. I’m not sure if it’s legal, but I would also add some inside video footage and photographs of the museum, just as a way of captivating people to personally visit the place.
I was really fascinzed by the the review as well as the app. I got the sense that your app really fulfills some requirements that Peter Samis brought up in his two essays – especially the fact that interaction and interpretation got to go hand in hand for the success of a museum app.
Nice point about the idea that this app manages to be a usefully virtual visit, but also appears would be equally useful as a guide in the museum–a tricky line to walk. I was struck by mention of allowing visitors to share or socially tag a location within the museum; I wonder if they are able to track which sites are shared the most often, and if it impacts future visitor behavior since museums are inherently a social space?
This fascinates me. I have been to this museum several times, but had never considered searching for their mobile app until my last visit. The Smithsonian was doing a lot of research, and asking for public input. For this assignment I downloaded the app from the American Indian Museum. This seems like a better app. Perhaps they could model an updated version after this one.