Summary

Interactives were intuitive and engaging and prompted a desire to learn more about the context of the data they were interacting with. Primary learning objectives were met for those visitors we were able to ask. Additional chart/graph scaffolding is needed to address concepts of temperature anomaly, average temperature, and data selection.

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Key takeaways

  1. Visitors want more context: “Why are these years hotter?”, “Why do some places only have small changes?”
  2. It is not clear why there is zooming for interactive #1 and are expecting find more when zooming, e.g. “How to continue?” and “Is that all?”
  3. Color representation needs to be consistent and clear, e.g. “Is pink good or blue good?” and “Which is the normal color? And how do you define normal?”
  4. Visitors want to know what is “average temperature”, e.g. “Does no changes means normal?” “Is steady good?”
  5. Visitors want to know why certain years/data is chosen, e.g. “Why did you choose these years? Why highlight these years?”
  6. International visitors don’t know Fahrenheit, e.g. “What is Fahrenheit?”
  7. Sound is engaging, but possibly distracting in the actual space, e.g. “Can we change the sound? Otherwise it will be annoying when children are moving back and forth”

Action items

  1. Add context:
    • annotate temporal areas of cooling, warming (e.g. mid century warming/cooling period)
    • annotate geographical areas of cooling, warming (e.g. European heat wave)
    • add basic historical markers of significance (e.g. industrial revolution, WWII)
    • add basic geographical markers (e.g. New York City, equator)
  2. Revisit learning objectives. If the learning objective for interactive #1 is to answer “How has the average global temperature changed?”, then why is there zooming? Should it be more like “What can you see about climate change at different timescales?”
  3. Define a clear color palette to represent cooling, warming
  4. Clearly define what the baseline (average) temperature is
  5. Make timeline for both interactive consistent
  6. Add celsius in parentheses
  7. Think about sound design and possibly test it in the actual space

Feedback for tools/process for evaluation

  1. Friday end-of-day does not have a lot of traffic in the Discovery room. Consider afternoons earlier in the week and rainy days.
  2. Perhaps find another location that has more natural foot traffic
  3. Screen was far away so some content was not legible
  4. Controller and screen setup was not conducive to candid use (facilitator was needed)
  5. We were not able to gather information from some visitors:
    • used interactives very quickly and left
    • visitors from separate groups used interactives simultaneously or consecutively
    • did not speak English