I had a few good takeaway points based on what we saw over the course of the week:

• Explain new technology completely.  Whenver you have a new technology or interaction technique that requires users to do some action that they’re unfamiliar with, education becomes your top priority.  Barcodes also do not naturally afford doing anything, meaning that users cannot learn on their own and must be taught directly.  We decided that a single instructional poster would help teach users better than explaining what a tag was on every single tag.  In this case though, it is absolutely critical to make as many visitors notice the instructional poster as possible, since if they miss it, they will never learn.
• Sanity-check your instructions.  In our user tests, we found a lot of small problems that didn’t occur to us as we designed the poster.  One of the biggest sources of confusion we encountered was that users weren’t sure what to take a picture of.  Some users tried to take a picture of the exhibits themselves, and some tried to take a picture of both the tag and its caption.  We had a few other similar difficulties,  which we would not have been able to debug if we didn’t test it with real people.
• Use barcodes to provide additional value.  We tend to think of technology as a replacement for traditional methods, whereas in some cases it’s better used as an augmentation to these methods (a topic I’ll cover in more detail later on).  As implemented, the barcodes in the planetarium simply displayed a block of text when accessed.  Some users said that this text could just as easily be shown in print next to the exhibit, and that displaying it in print would be much more accessible.  The big wins for barcodes are in offering access to things that can’t be done in print – interactive models, super-high resolution graphics, annotations, related content, etc.  

As always, I’m fascinated how real people react to new technology.  It’s so easy to forget that as exciting as technology like HCCB is, most people don’t know anything about it.  It shows me that we need research not just in the back room trying to build new technology, but also out in the world debugging it and seeing what people do with it.  Overall, I was thrilled for the opportunity to work at Adler, and look forward to see what they do with our work!