All posts by Zak Mensah

About Zak Mensah

I'm Head of Transformation for Bristol Culture, the best Bristol City Council Service. We welcome over 1 Million visitors each year. My job is to help the service and you make connections and DO the work that needs doing.

Transformation: Business as Usual

Notes, User research

Transformation is made one day at a time. Ideas, mistakes, doing and refining. Ship early, ship often. There are no ribbon cutting moments just the quiet satisfaction that a tool or way things are done become normal and it’s seen as business as usual. I love this transformation.
To counteract my nervous energy on my Dublin to New York City flight I made a brief list of things we’ve introduced in the recent past.
We’ve introduced new roles including Head of Digital and user researchers. New as in never been seen in the service before. How cool is that?! We’ve pushed as many decisions out from management as possible to keep the responsibility with whomever has the direct expertise and to release the bottleneck of waiting for the four of us. Yes we can still override a preferred course of direction.
We’re getting digital tools (basecamp and trello, emu) into position as THE way we do business – freeing up meeting time and being transparent. We’re also chipping away at a culture of being a ‘cultural business’. And that’s just on the staff front. All things to be super proud of from those across the team. What I love though is how “normal” all this is now. Tools like Basecamp were seen as for the nerds like me back in 2014 in the team. Yet in 2016 I can see we now use it for project managing all exhibitions as a matter of course.

We’re cooking on gas using google drive now too as the spreadsheet sharing and linking data gets more critical eg for kpi work. Accurate information over live/ancient information.
The public are seeing some of this work through our ‘Pay What You Think’ approach to our own in-house programme. Tinkering with pricing and value.
Stroll into Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and you’re now greeted upon entry and asked if you’d like to donate without delay.
All of the above are super closely aligned to our core value of “excellence” by focusing on the needs of the user – staff or public. You may be asked on your visit about any number of our services and we use this to make our service better.
Long live business as usual.

A special welcome for every visitor at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

User research, Visitor Services

Photo showing our new welcome area with the public at the desk

Image credit: Oliver Merchant

Post by Valerie Harland

If you have been at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery within the last week, you might have noticed that our street-level entrance lobby is now a much more welcoming place for our visitors.

Staff at a new Welcome Desk now greet everyone as they enter the museum. Visitors are asked if they’ve been to the museum before, if they’ve come for a general look around or for an exhibition, talk or particular gallery or artefact.

Welcome Desk staff state that there’s no general admission fee and that donations are welcome, adding any highlights or their own personal favourites from what’s on display.

The visitor map has been improved to more graphically show the layout of the museum and share some of the highlights in the galleries. Finally, visitors are asked if they would like to make a donation today to Bristol Museums Development Trust (the independent registered charity that raises funds for Bristol Museums and Archives).

To explain why we are asking for donations, the editorial on the reverse of the visitor map explains that behind the scenes curators, conservators, documentation professionals and a host of other specialist staff are working to care for the collections, create new displays and encourage people of all ages and interests to discover more.

Illustrated examples of how the £5 suggested donation could help are also provided in the visitor map, for example to conserve an artefact, examine minerals more closely, or conserve a painting.  The visitor map also outlines Bristol Museums’ sources of funds: this is approximately 40% from Bristol City Council, 30% from Arts Council England, and the remaining 30% coming from our shops, cafes, event hires, Friends groups, and fundraising from a variety of sources including visitors.

It is anticipated the new Welcome Desk will give passers-by more of an idea of what happens inside this Edwardian building, resulting in more people crossing the threshold. It should also significantly increase the donation per head (currently 7p per head at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), thus bringing in much needed funds that will enable us to do more with our collections and thus improve the visitor experience.

The Welcome Desk is being trialled for four months, until the end of October. If you have any comments about the Welcome Desk project, please contact Valerie Harland at valerie.harland@bristol.gov.uk

Introducing exhibition entry gates

Digital services, ,

Photo of a visitor entering the exhibition through the barrier

Image of Jake Mensah walking successfully through the barrier

This week we installed an entry gate system to our exhibition gallery at M Shed just in time for the opening of Children’s TV. Our “exhibition” gallery is located on the top floor, far away from the ground floor reception and not naturally easy to stumble across for the average wandering visitor. The project scope was to reduce the overall cost of an exhibition to the service and encourage as many visitors as possible to purchase tickets in advance. We’ll then test the success of the project against three of our key performance indicators – customer satisfaction, cost per transaction, and digital take-up.

Against each KPI we aim to:

Customer satisfaction – We don’t want people to experience a notable difference between our old approach of buying from a member of staff at the entrance and them buying online/kiosk and then entering the exhibition via the gate. We expect teething issues around the “behaviour” of this new approach but not from the technology itself which should be robust. The outcome we need is for little to no complaints within the first two weeks or until we find solutions for the teething problems.

Reduce cost per transaction – a typical paid exhibition costs approximately £7,000 to staff the ticket station. By moving to a one off fee (plus annual service) we’ll save money within 12 months and then in year two this will return a large saving for this function.

Increase digital take-up – until now it wasn’t possible to buy exhibition tickets online or using your mobile device at the museum. This is a feature that the new system enables so we’ll spend the next 18 months actively encouraging the public to buy a ticket “digitally” as part of our move to being digital by default. An additional benefit of using our website to buy tickets is that hopefully a percentage of these visitors will discover other services and events we offer. I also do wonder if we need to get a self-service kiosk to reduce the impact on the reception.

Setting up the entry gates

The third party supplier obviously manufactured and installed the gates but there was still lots for our team to deal with. We needed input from a whole gang of people. Our operations duo worked on ensuring we had the correct physical location, power, security and fire systems integration. Via collective feedback our visitor assistants provided various customer journeys and likely pinch points. Our digital team then helped with the installation and software integration for buying tickets. Design and marketing then helped with messaging. Throughout I was charged with overseeing the project and site visits with the supplier.

The major components of the project are:

  • Physical barriers – two stainless steel coated gates with a bunch of sensors and glass doors
  • Software for the barrier
  • Web service to purchase tickets
  • Onsite EPOS to sell tickets and print which is currently located at main reception

Initial observations

I was onsite for the launch and saw the first 50 or so visitors use the entry gates. My initial observations were that the gates didn’t negatively slow or concern the visitor and having asked a number of them it wasn’t a big deal. However an obvious pinch-point is that the barcode scanner doesn’t always read the barcode, leaving the visitor struggling. My hunch at this point is that our paper tickets are too thin and bendy which means the barcode scanner fails to recognise the barcode. In the coming week we’ll need to investigate if it is the barcode or barcode scanner as the primary cause and find a fix.

When multiple visitors arrive at the barrier there can be some confusion about how “one at a time” actually works. I’m hopeful that clear messaging will iron this out.

A slight issue was that we couldn’t take online payments due to a gateway issue which we’ll have fixed Monday.

Overall I’m very happy with the introduction of the gates and once we deal with the aforementioned teething issues it should be on to the next location for these gates. This is one of those projects that can only really be tested once they go live with real visitors, and the team did a fantastic job!

The Hidden Museum app has shipped!

The Hidden Museum, , ,

This week we quietly shipped/launched/released the Hidden Museum app on itunes.

You can read lots about how the project came about by reading the various blog posts on here with the tag “hidden museum“.

The reason we haven’t made a big splash about the launch comes down to one word BATTERIES. As the app has taken so long to get into the app store we are yet to get the chance to run around the building and check all the battery levels of the ibeacons. Thus the app is available but living by its moniker and being hidden from general view for a few days. If you do get a chance to play the game please do let me know what you thought by leaving a comment, tweeting @bristolmuseum or email.

On to the next projects to ship, CRM and alpha visitor giving.

Thanks to all the good folks who made the project a reality on our team, aardman and The University of Bristol. Finally to The Digital R&D Fund for supporting us, challenging us and helping us make a little dent in the world.

The Final report for The Hidden Museum project

The Hidden Museum, User research

We’re pleased AND relieved to share with you our final report on the Hidden Museum project. The project was 12 months of graft and a partnering up with Aardman Animations and the University of Bristol. We rolled our sleeves up with ibeacons, user research and working in a truly agile and remote manner.

We’ll have app publicly available very shortly and we’d love you to come along and give it a go.
Direct link to Report (PDF)

100 days of using Shopify POS tills

Digital services, Retail,

We’ve just passed our 100 day mark since the introduction of Shopify till system in our retail shops. In case you don’t intend on reading the whole post, i’ll tell you now that we’re still using Shopify and i think it’s safe to say it is a success.

In this post I want to cover us going live, what features we use at the moment and what our next steps are.

Choosing Shopify

Our previous system was never properly setup and as a team we didn’t take advantage of its potential. I could of stuck with it but I saw this as an opportunity to explore using the latest shopping cart technology from the web. I’m a big fan of popular tools that I’ve seen ‘scale’ regardless of the sector. I had heard about lots of arts/museum sector specific approaches which quite frankly scare me. As a sector we aren’t really all that ‘special’ when it comes to doing normal things like running a shop. So instead of looking at any of these potentially risky solutions where the market is small and we can get tied to one small supplier I just went straight to looking at what local shops and market stalls were using as i’m treating our retail as a small business so what better place to look. All of these were using web services via tablet or phone. Having attended a Shopify workshop back in June 2014 run by Keir Whitaker I felt that it had what the other systems had to offer so why not use this – no long spec document just a nose for good software and services.

Fast forward to launch

After an initial alpha use of Shopify using the free trial (tip: use the 7 day trial as your alpha test so you have no money to front) I felt happy to use Shopify with the public. Our fallback was to keep the old system plugged in and as we use a separate card reader, we could easily manually take orders with that and a calculator if we really got jammed up.

We decided to launch in early May at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. We decided to do one shop first and then if all went well we’d do live at M Shed, followed by our tills used by the exhibition team.

As Shopify is pretty user friendly we showed Helen how to add products, how to make a custom sale and how to cash up at the end of the day in less than 20mins. It turns out that Helen had never used an iPad before, let alone Shopify. But within minutes Helen was comfortable enough to plough on with only a little arm twisting from me.

Rather than add 100s of products to the inventory we decided to use the ‘custom sale’ option on the first day and then add any purchased products to the inventory retrospectively. As a word of advice, i think this approach makes the most sense instead of committing many hours to adding products to the Shopify inventory which you may or may not run with. Instead, add as you go.

On the first day I made sure that we had both Zahid and myself available. I spent the first ‘live’ hour down in the shop. Within an hour it was clear that I wasn’t needed. By the day of the first day Helen and Zahid knew way more than I did – in this type of case i’m glad to be made redundant!

After two days Helen asked us to remove the old system as she was very happy with how things were progressing. We have a small retail team of four part-time staff and a small bank of casual staff. Within 2-3 weeks I was getting staff thanking me for introducing the new system. In my previous two years I’ve never had such positive feedback. After the third week we also replaced our M Shed till too. On week six we also used this for our third till which is used to buy tickets for our exhibition (William Hogarth: Painter and Printmaker).

Helpful documentation and support

One of the things I love about modern day web services is that they normally offer good documentation and Shopify is no different. This not only helps us to learn about how to best use the service but saves any of us having to write lengthy support documentation. I’ve since used their live online chat a few times when i’ve got stuck and it’s 24/7. A service i’m sure many of the museum POS vendors can only dream of offering. You can ring, live chat, email or use the forums. All of which help staff when none of us digital types are around, which is the way it should be.

Mobile app for the win

I have a great retail team led by Helen Lewis. In theory I just need to know our current financial position. The mobile app lets me see live sales income for the last 90 days. This alone is a leap forward for POS and i get ‘POS envy’ now by all other retail managers whenever I show them. Furthermore I can see what product inventory level is is at anytime and i can scan barcodes to make sales if i really wanted to. I’m currently keeping an eye on our Hogarth mugs, scarfs, a book by Louise Brown and drinks. All new products that I like to track.

Reporting sales

To keep the cost down there a number of features which don’t come as standard and reporting is one of them. We have paid for the reporting features which we mostly use for splitting vat/non-vat and exhibition tickets at this point. In the next few months we will really get our head around what reports we want.

A few problems and issues

We’re very happy so far with our shopify service but there have been a few teething problems worth mentioning.

We hit our first major technical snag – till drawer says No!

Our exhibition till has a unique challenge compared to our retail shops. We have over 50 visitor assistants. For each day of the exhibition we may have any one or more of them on the till. This poses a few challenges, mainly around processes and training. Some people had no problems but others really struggled with the idea of an iPad for a till. Nothing too bad. But then it happened. I got a call to say that the exhibition till wasn’t working. I went down and sure enough it was working. False alarm right? Another call 30mins later. This time I could see the problem. Although we could use the Shopify app, the till cash drawer refused to open. Turn it off, turn it back on. Boom. Fixed…. so I thought. This kept happening, time after time. Anyway it turns out that although Shopify will run perfectly happily offline, the cash drawer NEEDS wifi to be triggered to open. A major problem that made lots of visitor assistants quite reluctant to use the till. The problem only occurred on one of the four tills. Zahid tracked down the issue to the router. Apparently there is a known issue with some routers – despite it working fine with the same router elsewhere. Zahid swapped out the router and the problem hasn’t come back. Luckily for us we could use the shop as a fallback till but this wasn’t the best customer service period.

Costs of goods isn’t standard

By default there isn’t a feature to include the ‘cost of goods – COGS’ which are essential for knowing the price you paid against the retail price and thus your profit margin. How did I miss that in the alpha! Luckily one of the reasons I chose Shopify was for its adaptability. Shopify has a useful feature to allow them or third parties to make apps for beefing up the default service. One of these, deepmine looks like it has COGS so we’ll be trialling this very soon.

Not many hints and tricks yet

I haven’t found much information about using Shopify POS as it is still quite new. This means that it hasn’t been super fast to find answers to some of our issues. One of the reasons i’m writing this is to increase that information pool. Oh and there is no public roadmap for what’s coming so follow the blog to stay in the loop

What’s coming next

Now that we’re comfortable with Shopify we’re starting to turn our attention to the next phase of work.

  • Trial deepmine app to get COGs and deep reporting
  • Setup better custom reports to help staff
  • Offer group workshops on basic training and reporting
  • Add inventory levels to all products
  • Add photos to all products
  • Explore email upsell and sales offers

Get in touch

I’ve had several chats with other museums who spotted by last blog post asking about Shopify. Please do get in touch by phone 0117 922 3571 or zak.mensah@bristol.gov.uk if you want me to help you with anything around our use of Shopify. We’ll also be happy to be paid consultants to set up your service if you need a proper hand.

Using Shopify to run an affordable museum shop till system (POS)

Digital services,

Photo of Shopify till - iPad, till and printer first use

Across the service we typically take payments for our two major retail shops and  ‘paid for’ exhibitions at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and M Shed. To date we have never set the tills up to give us useful reporting beyond the “groups of products” e.g. ‘books’ or ‘cards’ which is simply not good enough [no shots].  We need useful data to help us understand our business and improve our service. GDS refer to ‘designing with data‘ in their design principles and I see no reason not to be the same across the museums, especially with trading and IT retail systems.

During 2015-16 we will design our retail offer based on good usable data about our visitors, product ranges and sector trends.

Introducing Shopify Point of Sale (POS)

In the not too distant past I used to do freelance web projects and shopify would regularly appear on my radar. It is an affordable (from $9 a month) web shop that recently introduced the ability to run as a till system called Shopify POS. Due to its popularity with web folk I trust, our desire to get a move on and its feature set to cost ratio, I figure we have nothing to lose but try it out – we have no historic data either so anything is better than our current position.

Also, we’re an Arts Council England lead for digital so what better problem to solve than affordable till systems to kick off our 2015-18 partnership?

We will use Shopify POS to:

  • Take cash and card payments
  • Manage our products and stock level
  • Provide both retail and service management with regular performance reports
  • Act as a mininum viable service to help plan for the future
  • Dip our toe in the water with an online shop offer (both POS and web shop are interelated making it easy to do)

Getting started

I made a “management” decision to switch POS and so this is an enforced project for the retail team who have understood my reasoning are behind the project. I have said that we have nothing to lose but this may not work and i’ll hold my hands up if we fail. We had a call with the Shopify team and knew we needed some new kit:

  • Two paid instances of Shopify POS – one for each retail shop. I am disappointed there is to no way to have multiple shops from one account even if it was a discounted upgrade. This will enable us to report accurately each shop as its own business
  • iPad air 2 with Shopify (use the 7 day trial first) with retail add-on and reporting ($59 per month)
  • Bluetooth barcode reader, till drawer and receipt printer from uk reseller POS hardware for approx. £250 ex Vat (turns out you can use any drawer though as they are standard
  • Reuse existing card reader (approx £20 per month)
  • iPad secure stand
  • Router to avoid public wifi and maintain security – fitted by IT services

First steps

  1. Test a proof of concept – Zahid and Tom did a stand up job of getting the system to play nice with our infrastructure and i can’t thank them enough as this proved to be a pain for an unknown reason on our network.
  2. Once we had our test ‘alpha’ system working, we confirmed that IT were happy for us to proceed. They generally like projects that they don’t have to get involved in too much! As we’re using the existing corporate contract for our card payments which never touch Shopify there isn’t a security risk at that point AND it doesn’t touch our finance system. Essentially Shopify is “off” the network and at worse we expose our reporting and products – secure passwords for staff is the biggest challenge!
  3. Add our MANY products. Our retail and admin team are working on this at the moment
  4. ‘Beta’ Test over the week of 27th April alongside the existing system with our retail manager Helen who is critical to the success of the project
  5. Show the retail team how to use the system and get their feedback – after all they need to use and champion the project and service

Next steps

Assuming staff are happy and we’re getting the data we need I plan to put the service into ‘live’ starting 1st May so we can get 11 months usable data. We’ll be sharing our progress on the blog. PLEASE get in touch if you have anything to help us make a better service or have any questions.

A full shop till system for unless than £1000 a year…..let’s see!

 

5.13 Staying focused on the Hidden museun

The Hidden Museum

 

One of the insights I’d like to share about our partnership thus far is that working together over a long period takes focus. Oh and this focus will wobble up and down. Since the start of the project each partner has probably worked on 5-10 other projects plus “other stuff called our lives” for example I’ve had my first kid, got promoted and lost a bunch of sleep. Others have had similar life-changing situations. Yet we’re all still committed to the Hidden museum and supporting each other. We used to meet every fortnight in the aardman cave to review our progress and motivate each other. Yet once got our prototype running there was a period of silence. … Well except for the sounds of our project manager rightfully hounding us for later than promised paperwork – we’re sooo sorry. To stay focused takes effort. Not effort to plan, code or observe, but to stop for a moment and drop each other a line “hey guys lets hook up” and so here we are again. All huddled around Basecamp, trello and the faint glow of an iPad to unleash our hard work onto the public for the pilot launch. Aardman came with sticker packs, Frances and darren with recording devices and questions and us with the spaces, 16 iPads and hoards of eager public.

 

How far we’ve come. Onwards, focused and eager to show and tell.

4.2 Trying out the Hidden Museum Game by Emma

The Hidden Museum

Notes from Emma, our marketing apprentice who had the following to say after trying the app for the first time:

Before you start the game

select from some options what you want (player number, ages, time etc)

  • If already (from the last game) on the “highlighted option” I want – I don’t know if it had been selected for me. Maybe something to indicate it, e.g Change colour? Sound? Vibrate like movement
  • I selected “1  player”. Then it says who want to go first? – Obviously me. Silly irrelevant question. Unless you are playing against the computer (you’re not) which at this point isn’t obvious
  • Pick “badge” – ? Is that term unusual? …Usually ‘character, player’. Also your ‘badge’, character choice doesn’t appear later on … to the user -could seem irrelevant then…
  • A bit slow to scroll through. And it has to be in the centre of the screen to be selected (even though you can see the edges of the previous and next badge.) (Perhaps two { O } lines, brackets to suggest where it need to be placed to be selected)
  • Say “how long” ‘not long’ is as different people have different ideas, interpretations of how long ‘not long’ is. (Be clear ‘not long – 10-20mins’ so people know what they are getting and how much of the game they can roughly do.) I’m not sure people would want to commit to one hour. Would the second option be something like ‘40mins- one hour’

Playing the game

  • Exciting and fun – I’m not going to lie. It really is. I would play it again (I did) too
  • Reminded me of an Easter egg hunt…
  • Info – short, and interesting enough
  • I DO NOT like the count down on the map (and not necessarily enough time) I feel under pressure. Not in a good way
  • Made me view things in gallery/section that I wouldn’t normally, perhaps to be attracted to
  • Nice being led
  • Too much running around! Okish if you are on your own, can’t imagine that working in a big group (e.g family of 4) as you might get distracted as you get from A-B …(should be able to pick where you want to play the game e.g what floor/section).
  • I personally wouldn’t want to/cba to find/ask a member of staff something.
  • If you don’t find the object, you still have to take a picture of it…
  • from our visitor assistant –Colours not on brand?! Doesn’t appear very Bristol Museum & Art Gallery like
  • The right amount of looking at a screen vs. looking around you
  • Like the interaction – taking a picture.

4.2 Alex and Fay test the app

The Hidden Museum

We (Alex – volunteer co-ordinator  and Fay – User researcher) spent a lovely half an hour wandering round the museum with the app, discovering some things that we hadn’t discovered before – we thought it was very fun and simple to use.

We got a little confused at first as it asked how many players there were and took our ages – we thought this meant we might be playing against each other (and got ready for a bit of competition!). The only game that did ask us to play together was in the geology gallery, where it asked us to find something broken. We were a bit confused by this, what with it mostly being natural objects like rocks and fossils. We later realised that there was a broken bone that we could have chosen but this did require some creative thinking! We also weren’t too sure what the numbers next to the game themes were – were these our scores? We worked out they were the amount of games that we had completed. Should they be reset each time someone new starts playing?

At one point we were sent along to the Curiosity gallery, where we were asked to find an object – a broken pot – which we couldn’t find anywhere! Turns out it was in the under 7s area (where you have to take your shoes off). We wondered why it might take us into there being two adults… By this point we’d run out of time and the app assumed we had found it. At the end of the countdown there was nowhere to say that we hadn’t found the object and I ended up having to take a picture of something random to move it along.

We really loved the things we unlocked for completing challenges, but they didn’t seem to be relevant to the areas that we were in. The first one we did gave us some lovely info about the RWA after we’d taken a picture of the ichthyosaur, and one in the geology gallery told us about objects we assumed must be in the Egypt gallery – we thought it might be nice to have been given snippets of info about objects in the galleries we were in, so we could go and have a look straight away before moving on to the next game.

We really enjoyed moving round the museum with the map and loved how it alerted you about where you were – that worked really well.

Supporting evidence for milestone 4.2 – informal user testing