HoPE Climate Wall Documentation

Summary

• Interactive button controls were mostly intuitive and engaging after brief playing; some pressed multiple buttons at once
• Nearly all visitors were able to answer What’s warming the planet? correctly, mostly citing the graph, and about half of the visitors said they learned something new
• There was some confusion about the prompts and labels

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Key takeaways

1. Visitors seem to enjoy the ability to press multiple buttons, though only some were clearly doing so to compare different graphs (many were just playing or “making music”)
2. If the buttons were placed horizontally, visitors were more likely to move through the buttons linearly (left to right); If placed in two rows, it was more open-ended (like a guessing game) and more likely to press multiple buttons at once
3. Some younger visitors interpret the question What’s warming the planet? as What warms the planet? (i.e. “The sun”)
4. Some visitors wanted some further context/annotation on the graphs. “Why volcano cools the planet? What happened in that year?”
5. It was hard for visitors to articulate what each graph was (e.g. a graph of how volcanos make the climate warmer or cooler over time), even though they answered the prompt correctly; they seem to mostly rely on comparing the shapes/trends of the graph and identify which one is going up
6. Older visitors tended to read the pop-up text; younger ones not so much

Action items

1. Consider re-phrasing the prompt to something like: What’s making the planet warmer? or What’s causing global warming?
2. Consider other ways of organizing/placing/labeling the buttons to encourage open-ended interaction
3. Possibly provide additional content when multiple buttons are pressed, if/when applicable
4. Consider reducing the length of each pop-up text if possible
5. Explore more ways of making it clear that each graph shows how much a particular factor makes the climate warmer or cooler over time

Feedback for tools/process for evaluation

1. Thursday mid-day had better visitor traffic than friday end-of-day
2. The use of a monitor on table directly in front of visitor was better for legibility than on wall-mounted screen
3. Some young visitors were a bit too aggressive with the controls
4. Asking what the visitors learned (and thus what they previously knew) was a useful question