Over The Past Two Weeks, Our Project Has Moved Fully Into The Post-Production Phase
It began with an important meeting with the 51 Steps Museum CEO and the Hoverlay team. Because communication earlier in the semester has been limited, this was our first opportunity to receive direct feedback from 51 Steps. Thankfully, our team received only minimal notes, which reassured us that we had been moving in the right direction despite the earlier communication challenges.
That meeting, along with our user testing, highlighted something we’ve now seen again and again: written instructions on their own aren’t enough in an AR experience. Even when the text is clear and the buttons are front and center, often people just don’t read them. This means we have needed to rethink how we guide visitors. We have come to realize that three layers of direction are needed: written instructions, narration, and visual demonstrations that show exactly what to do.
This is what led to the video I just filmed for this project that will probably (hopefully) be our last. It features Garrett—our team’s resident actor—demonstrating how to walk around the AR bust of Josephine Butler. Because most of the interactive buttons are located on her hat, it’s important that visitors know they have to physically move around the statue to access everything. 
Using Garrett made sense not only because he has acting experience, but also because our resources are limited. For the same reason, he’ll also be narrating the experience. While relying on a team member wasn’t the original plan, it’s turned out to be the most practical solution considering our resources for this project, and it keeps the directions clear and consistent.
The need for painstaking clarity also brought to our attention another major challenge: our information cards would now have to be extremely condensed. Like the exhibit labels in a physical museum, we have information cards associated with each button on Josephine Butler's hat that give the reader an understanding of what cause this button on her hat is associated with and what she did in working with that cause. Much to my dismay, we discovered that each card can only contain a single sentence of 25 words or fewer in order for it to have any hope of being read. After spending so much time researching Josephine Butler’s life and the many causes she championed, I, admittedly, found this hard to accept. Her work was incredibly rich and layered, and condensing each cause into a short sentence feels reductive, even if it is necessary for user engagement.
This limitation reinforced the importance of including a link to the five-minute mini-documentary called Trail Blazer - The Josephine Butler Story, which is meant to be the final experience in the sequence. I had advocated for the documentary from the beginning, knowing we would not have the resources to build out every one of Butler’s causes within the AR environment. Now, after seeing how much of the information must be condensed, the value of providing more information in the form of a video “leave-behind” is even more obvious. While five minutes is still too short, it gives visitors the opportunity to get a fuller sense of Butler’s life outside of the AR experience when they have more time.
With the final demonstration video now integrated into our Hoverlay build, the remaining steps include recording the narration, finalizing the text boxes that still contain placeholder content, and I'm wrapping up updates to the website. Even with how busy my personal schedule has been this week—opening a new art studio location and participating in a full week of events with the faith-based nonprofit I volunteer with—our project continues to progress smoothly.
As we head toward the finish line, it’s exciting to see the experience becoming cohesive. Even within the limitations of the medium, it has been rewarding to find creative ways to make Josephine Butler’s story accessible, meaningful, and respectful of her legacy, and I am really proud of our team for being all-in and coming up with and executing creative solutions to the challenges we've faced.