Museum Guided Exhibition problem A state museum wants to provide detailed information about their collections in a multimedia format within the museum. The museum has two types of exhibit; the permanent collection that is on display at the museum at all times and a temporary exhibit that is on display for several months only. The museum curators have installed information kiosks all over the museum to provide information on individual items in the permanent collection. The information provided gives the details of the item including, the name of the item, the history and a description of the item. The information is provided in text and many items also have a multimedia recording about the item which gives details of its use and history. The information kiosks also provide information about the location of facilities and services within the museum such as the toilets, parking, food stores and museum shops. The curators want to provide visitors with a tablet device that will guide them through an exhibition. The tablet should allow a visitor to follow a pre-determined path through the exhibition, but should also allow a visitor to wander at random through the exhibition space. The tablet should show each item on exhibit with a photograph of the item, plus as much contextual information as the curators provide for that item. The contextual information may include photographs, drawings, illustrations of the item in use, and may also include a multimedia presentation about the item. Visitors should be able to search for a particular item in the exhibit and should also be able to browse through the entire exhibit using the information provided on the tablet. They should be able to search for a particular item and find the location of that item within the exhibit. The tablet should be able to direct the visitor to the location of the required item on display. The tablets must also provide information about the location of facilities and services within the museum such as the toilets, parking, food stores and museum shops. The tablets must be able to show on a map the current location with the exhibition and the shortest route to the required service. You have been commissioned to design the exhibition tablet interface for the museum. The museum curators want to provide their visitors with the ability to be guided through an exhibition, browse the exhibition, locate the items within the exhibition, and locate the facilities and services within the museum. Information on the individual items of the exhibition should also be provided. The tablet interface should be designed so that it can be used for different exhibitions using different themes and colour schemes. The tablets should be usable by all types of visitors, from the young students to the older visitors. Some of the visitors may have limited understanding of English; therefore the provided instructions and information should be easy to understand. Your design focus is on providing the application screen design and layout function for the tablet. You are not required to design or interface with the database that will support the exhibition at this stage. You are also not required to design for a specific type of tablet. You may make any other assumptions not stated here but you must state them in your Key Assumptions in your Project Brief. You will need to provide drawings of the interface design for your chosen system. Drawings must clearly show all components of your design and each component must be clearly labelled. Do not use any existing Museum name, tablet name, trademarks or pictures.

Task:

You are to prepare the project scope and initial requirements and assumptions for a new Interface Design project for the Museum Guided Exhibition as outlined in the Museum Guided Exhibition problem case study.

You are to prepare a Project Brief for this project.

You should approach this project as a "blue sky" project. That is, you are going to design and develop an interface that is different to those that you have previously worked on. This means that your planning will necessarily be somewhat more diffident as you will be doing research during the planning and design process to achieve your design aims.

Your project brief should include the following sections:

1. Overview
2. Vision
3. Scope
4. Outcomes
5. Key assumptions
6. Objectives, Outputs and Targets
7. Success Criteria

The project brief should concentrate on the Overview, Vision, Scope, Outcomes and Key Assumptions at this stage. These sections define your vision for the project and should be reasonably well developed.

The Objectives and Success Criteria may not be well known at this stage, but some effort should be made to determine what they are. These will be added to later in the project.