Unlock the book 2023
2023
Interactive bookcase for the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense Milano
Interaction Design • Heuristics • Workshop project • Concept and scenario development • Exhibition spaces The Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, located in Milan, hosts many antique books and exhibitions. In the case of this project, an exhibition was being hosted in 2023, and since visitors were not able to interact physically with objects due to their conservation, there was an interactive bookcase that was meant to give extra information about the objects within it through digital interactions.
The workshop’s objective was for us to analyze the ways we could interact with the bookcase, conduct heuristics analysis of the UI, and ideate ways to innovate the existing interactions and the object itself.
What I learned
This project was very valuable for me since I got the opportunity to contextualize interactions in a real-life project within an exhibition space. It was very interesting to collaborate with my colleagues who all had
different cultural backgrounds and this led us to understand and give different solutions that made the project successful.
Tools:
Figma - digital prototyping
Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop - visual assets and mockups
Responsibilities:
Concept development
Interactions evaluation & definition
Heuristics evaluation
UI re-design
Project done in collaboration with: Muan Cao, Rui
Chen, Camila Contreras, Francesco Scaramuzzi,
Sara Sorrentino, Laura Spedicato & Ruolin Zhao
Laurea Magistrale Digital & Interaction Design
1. Research & Analysis
Case studies
We first looked after different case studies to see what interactions were possible and which others were relevant for the task we had at hand.
Amongst the case studies we saw that there were interaactive screens available that followed a person’s movement or position as well as out-of-the-box solutions to interact with books using projections.
Bookcase interaction
After visiting the library and interacting with the bookcase, we were able to determine areas of opportunity in the way users can perceive certain actions or elements of the UI.
First interaction:
a. It is not clear that it is an interactive screen at first glance
b. it is not clear which books you can interact with either.
Browsing the book:
a. It is not clear enough that users can swipe through the pages.
b. The user doesn’t know what to do with the highlighted text at first sight. There is a text above the book but is not very engaging.
c. The hierarchy of the text and the UI can be confusing for the user to understand the actions they can take.
2. Defining solutions
Our team came up with “Evolve” a revisited bookcase and we worked as well with two scenarios where interactions between the visitor and the bookcase were more understandable and gave a good experience.
The scenarios consisted of Long distance & Short distance interactions.
The long distance interaction consists of attracting the visitor towards the bookcase by using lights that pulse below it. This creates attention and indicates there can be actions done with the object.
In the short distance interactions we thought about integrating feedforward elements to guide the visitor through the interactive experience.
Some of these feedforwards were pulsing circles in the screen, that guide users around the clickable elements and through all the possible actions. The UI was also revisited to give visual clarity about texts that could be translated, or extra information about the book that is being browsed.