Lights, Camera, Interaction
TL;DR
Problem: How can we help the Kelly Strayhorn Theater provide their customers with engaging experiences during the pandemic?
Solution: We designed a concept for a virtual reality platform that brings theater interaction into people’s homes by providing them with opportunities to interact with their friends, the audience, and cast members during the intermission and after the show in immersive environments.
Team
Aziz Ghadiali, Nitya Devireddy, Christie Sohn, Christine Chen
The Kelly Strayhorn theater is a Pittsburgh theater with a tumultuous history. Throughout the years the theater has had difficulty prospering due to many factors including the perception of East Liberty and the particular brand of theater they support. With the COVID-19 pandemic, these struggles have grown and the theater was looking for novel ways to expand its outreach and turn things around.
The theater had a number of objectives including increasing community participation and donations, encourage people to interact more with other diverse perspectives, and shifting the in-person theater experience to virtual platforms.
Understanding what “is”
My team’s first step was to use background information and data about KST and their target audience to begin defining a specific area of focus.
We created several journey and stakeholder maps to evaluate our current understanding of the theater-going process to both externalize our internally held assumptions and define our user research goals. Our biggest finding was that providing engaging digital content was one of the biggest gaps in KST’s current online presence.
Initial project definition
How might we improve KST’s digital presence as a tool for promotion and engagement?
Using our initial background research we developed some questions and hypotheses to help us better scope the problem space:
- We believed that focussing on the “attending the show” part of the journey would be the most fruitful for identifying a solution
- What kinds of content does KST’s followers want to see?
- Are people motivated to motivated to learn more about KST through their current online presence?
- Other Qs?
Going “out” into the field
Equipped with a clearer research focus, our team ventured out into the world to learn more about our the wants and needs of theater-goers. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic we were not able to safely use in-person research methods so we had to get a little creative.
Using the power of Zoom, we designed a remote contextual inquiry research plan to replace what would have been the in-person experience of accompanying people to actual theater shows to better understand their wants and needs.
To bring the participants into our desired state of mind, we used the method of artifact analysis embedded in a semi-structured interview. We had participants bring artifacts ranging from tickets and playbills to actual memorabilia from shows that they felt reflected a significant aspect of the theater-going experience. As researchers, we took the role of a person trying to understand more about the theater-going experience allowing users to be the experts describing their artifacts and how they capture the essence of the theater-going experience.
Key insights
“I connect to a show the most when I get to discuss the show in depth with friends after the show. It helps me remember the show better and reveals any personal connections.”
- People desired a broad range of interactivity during the show with their friends, other theater-goers, and the performance members
- People relied on external factors for motivation to attend theater performances and support local theaters
- People found that the environmental context of the theater played a significant part in making the experience unique and memorable
Generating Ideas
Using our research insights, we put pen to paper and started ideating potential ways to address and confirm their validity.
Crazy 8's
We used the crazy 8’s ideation game to explore a wide variation of novel ways to address the user needs we identified by forcing ourselves to quickly generate ideas that focused on the needs and vales of future users based on the research we had conducted this far.
Using the ideas we generated, we discussed the different user needs and voted on the ones we felt wee most critical and fleshed them out into story boards.
Validating our user needs
Using our storyboards, we conducted a speed dating activity to evaluate user’s reactions to the ideas we generated to understand whether we were addressing user’s actual needs.
The four needs we created storyboards for and tested were:
- The need to replicate the theater environment at home
- The need to interact with members of the performance
- The need to have natural human interaction when during the experience
- The need to be motivated to donate
Key insights
“Watching a show at home is not the same as viewing it live, because I cannot interact with others and be completely immersed in the experience.”
High priority needs
The need to replicate the theater environment at home
The need to have natural human interaction when during the experience
Medium priority needs
The need to interact with members of the performance
Low priority needs
The need to be motivated to donate
Understanding what could be
Using the collective research insights we had gathered up to this point, we began the process of understanding what kind of solution could address our high priority user needs.
After discussing a plethora of potential solutions we decided that we wanted to explore how emerging technologies could be used to augment the theater-going experience in an effective way. We decided to go the route of virtual reality since it presented the most opportunities for recreating the best parts of the in-person experience at home.
Experience Prototyping
After choosing to adopt a VR solution, we wanted to bring our idea in front of our users to see if the solution would:
- Satisfy people’s needs for in-person interactions
- Be a comfortable method for people to interact with others
- Be easy for people to comprehend and use
Building the prototype
Due to our time, monetary, and technical constraints, we created a low-fidelity prototype by designing various VR environments in Figma that were three A4 pages in width. We then printed out the environments and created cardboard models to simulate our “VR headset” that participants would use.
Testing
We tested three different environments with users. In the first, the users have the option to either interact with their friends to discuss and share their thoughts about the show. In the second, they are able to interact with other audience members and meet people who have similar interests or thoughts about the performance. In the final environment, users have the option to interact with members of the cast and ask questions.
We made the conscious decision to set have our experience available to users during the intermission rather than making the entire end to end experience virtual as we thought that it would be overwhelming to users and may become uncomfortable wearing a VR headset for an extended period of time.
Key insights
“Having spacial awareness of the theater environment and the people around you while engaging with others definitely beats the stacked video frames on zoom”
- People had varying levels of comfort when it came to interacting with other audience members in the current experience
- People wanted to use this experience beyond just the intermission
- People wanted a higher level of interaction with that actors that really takes advantage of the of the affordances of VR
- People were worried about the gap in immersiveness of the experience based on the specific VR device they were using (Google Cardboard vs. Oculus).
Iterating
Based on our user feedback we made a few improvements to our experience:
- We added more structure to the “meet the audience” by auto-assigning users into small groups to participate in a fun trivia game related the the show to give help them initiate the interaction with others
- We change the “meet the cast” experience to include more intimate interactions beyond asking questions such as receiving digital autographs that you could have mailed to you on a variety of memorabilia.
We also decided to focus on framing our solution as a service provided by the theater so that theater-goers would be able to receive a consistently high quality experience. We determined that the increased engagement with the theater would outweigh the cost of obtaining and maintaining these devices.
Presenting our findings
Future work
The next steps for this project include conducting additional user tests to refine our service as we move into higher fidelity versions. In addition, we would want to work with KST to figure out a plan for an initial beta run where we could actually build a simple virtual experience and test it with real audience members to better understand people’s perception of the service, hidden costs, further improvements that would need to be made to the experience, and how to effectively deploy this at a larger scale that supports KST’s long term business goals.
