Revisiting the Visit: Understanding How Technology Can
Shape the Museum Visit
Rebecca E. Grinter, Paul M. Aoki, Amy Hurst*, Margaret H. Szymanski,
James D. Thornton, and Allison Woodruff
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
*College of Computing
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Georgia Institute of Technology
Palo Alto, CA 94304
801 Atlantic Drive
{beki, aoki, szymanski, jthornton,
Atlanta, GA 30332
woodruff}@parc.com
amyhurst@cc.gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper reports findings from a study of how a
guidebook was used by pairs of visitors touring a historic
house. We describe how the guidebook was incorporated
into their visit in four ways: shared listening, independent
use, following one another, and checking in on each other.
We discuss how individual and groupware features were
adopted in support of different visiting experiences, and
illustrate how that adoption was influenced by social
relationships, the nature of the current visit, and any
museum visiting strategies that the couples had. Finally,
we describe how the guidebook facilitated awareness
between couples, and how awareness of non-guidebook
users (strangers) influenced use.
Keywords
Electronic guidebook, museum, visitor behavior
INTRODUCTION
The last few years have seen a new focus on the
possibilities of individual and collaborative applications in
homes and public spaces. This presents a new challenge
for the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW), which is to understand the “work” on which
individuals wish to coordinate, communicate and
collaborate when they are away from the “workplace.” It
also presents a new opportunity for the field: to understand
how issues that have influenced the field such as adoption
and awareness “play out” among individuals seeking to
engage in shared activities.
In this paper, we describe how a guidebook designed to
promote a shared experience shapes people’s interactions
with each other in the context of their museum visit. The
data is based on a study of the system in use by the general
public that has not been previously reported. We found
that participants reported using the technology for four
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different kinds of activity: shared listening, independent
use, following each other, and checking in on their
companion. Further, participants described their ability to
adopt the technology for any of these activities as being
influenced by the technology, their companion, the
presence of other people, existing strategies for visiting
museums, and the nature of the current visit. We describe
how the technology was used to facilitate awareness, and
how awareness shaped technology use. The paper begins
with a discussion of guidebooks and collaboration, the
guidebook we designed, and the study we conducted.
DESIGNING TECHNOLOGY FOR PUBLIC SETTINGS
Museums have employed portable electronic guidebooks
for many years, going back at least as far as the late 1950s
when Acoustiguide developed a tour of Eleanor
Roosevelt’s home using reel-to-reel tape players [3]. They
continue to be the subject of research and development,
with recent work typically focused on the use of portable
computers (e.g., [1, 9]). In spite of this long history,
electronic guidebooks still raise many design challenges.
One design challenge for audio-based guidebooks is the
physical delivery of content. Use of open speakers is
convenient but only suitable in settings where additional
noise is not a problem, such as interactive and children’s
museums. In other settings, such as art museums, undue
noise may be disruptive, so audio content is usually
delivered through earphones. However, the use of
earphones brings another feature of the museum visit into
relief: the presence of companions. With many headsets,
companions can be seen but not easily heard; as a result,
audio guidebooks can isolate visitors from their
companions [20].
Since museum visits are frequently social in nature [18,
23], it is not enough to design a usable and useful system
for individual visitors. The design challenge becomes, in
part, a question of understanding what visitors want to
share when they visit museums. While research has begun
to explore this space (e.g., [11, 18, 23]), questions of what
visitors do together in museums remain. Naturally, these
questions also raise the issue of how best to facilitate and
support sharing between visitors.
Our system, Sotto Voce, is a guidebook designed to support
social interaction between visitors and their companions.
The project has been through three design-evaluation
iterations. The first evaluation established that visitors,
without prompting, integrated audio clips played through
open air into their interactions [26]. Based on these
findings, we designed a mechanism that enabled visitors
wearing headphones to be able to share audio content in a
similar (but not identical) way. We evaluated this
mechanism, which we call eavesdropping, in a second
study [4]. This led to the third study — the subject of this
paper. In the first two studies we invited people to try the
technology in a historic home setting during a closed day
when they were alone in the house. While this provided us
with rich insights, the purpose of the third study was to see
how the technology fared under “real” museum conditions.
Some of the issues involved in designing a shared-listening
system can be illustrated by considering them in relation to
the extensive work on media spaces [8]. Media spaces help
people to coordinate by providing them with media
channels that promote awareness and communication.
Many media spaces have both audio and video
components, although some studies argue that audio-only
media spaces can be both usable and useful [22]. Indeed,
Thunderwire [2] and Voice Loops [24] are two examples of
audio-only systems that provide support for activity
coordination.
Sotto Voce can be described as a content-centered audio
media space, one that allows two visitors to coordinate their
playing of audio descriptions. Like Thunderwire and Voice
Loops, Sotto Voce relies on the use of audio to promote
awareness and a shared experience. Indeed, we report
findings that some people used the sounds they heard
through Sotto Voce for awareness, much like the reports
that Thunderwire users knew that people were working
when they heard typing. However, unlike Thunderwire and
Voice Loops, Sotto Voce does not provide a mechanism for
talking through the system. Rather, it provides shared
context through technological sharing of content, with the
intent of facilitating interaction in the “open air channel.”
This is made possible by the fact that visitors are not
usually as far apart as the users of Thunderwire or Voice
Loops. More precisely, the visitors are not tethered to
fixed, widely-separated locations such as desks or consoles.
Instead, Sotto Voce users have a high degree of local
mobility [6], a freedom to explore and move around the
museum space while remaining relatively co-located.
Sotto Voce is also a mobile technology. Mobility and the
collaborative use of mobile technologies have also been a
focus of recent CSCW interest (see for example, [6, 13, 17,
21, 25]). However, Sotto Voce differs from these in two
ways. First, Sotto Voce is limited in use to a particular
setting, the museum. Findings presented show that the
setting shaped how the technology was adopted and used.
Second, the length of interaction with the technology was
much shorter—visitors typically used it for less than half an
hour. The length of engagement with the technology
influenced how it was designed by requiring us to make the
technology as intuitive as possible to adopt.
Additional issues arise when the system is compared to
other collaborative technologies for public settings. For
example, Benford et al. [7] have designed a number of
technologies to support Inhabited TV, a blending of
broadcast television with Collaborative Virtual
Environments (CVEs). In one of their experiments (“The
Mirror”), the television show was displayed directly in the
CVE with the intent of stimulating participant interaction.
Our study findings are analogous in that they show that
shared guidebook content did create interaction between
the visitors. (Of course, the museum interactions were
considerably enriched by additional resources such as the
visitors’ control over their content playback and the objects
themselves – including those without descriptive content
[4].)
One other feature of Inhabited TV has a salience for Sotto
Voce. In their discussion of challenges for Inhabited TV,
they observe that in their first experiment, a public poetry
performance, the poetry reading was masked by the sound
of audience members talking loudly among themselves. In
the immersive CVE, social conventions about the
relationship between an audience and a performer were
lost. In contrast, our findings show that conventions were
not ignored by participants when they used Sotto Voce;
further these conventions influenced how they adopted the
technology. These conventions came from the presence
and potential presence of strangers as well as the study
participants’ own strategies for visiting museums. That is,
visitors plainly remain part of a larger social context as well
as their own within-group social context.
Electronic guidebooks offer the opportunity to explore a
number of research challenges in computer science, and as
such, a number of research projects have been carried out.
Many of these have focused on exploiting sensing and
location awareness technologies, to explore ubiquitous
computing concerns (see, e.g., [1, 9]). Sotto Voce differs
from these, and other commercial efforts, in its focus on
supporting interaction among visitors.
THE SYSTEM: SOTTO VOCE
The design of Sotto Voce was primarily motivated by the
collaborative and communicative needs of visitors.
Through the visitor studies literature, our own observations
of museum visitors, and our experience with a previous
electronic guidebook, we knew that many visitors wish to
be able to listen to descriptive information together and
share their reactions [26]. However, at the same time,
visitors generally want control over their experience.
Consequently, the design strikes a balance between these
(as well as other) concerns.
In the rest of this section, we describe our system
prototype, focusing on the features that are relevant for this
paper. The system and its design rationale are presented in
more detail elsewhere [4].
Guidebook User Interface
Sotto Voce is implemented on a handheld computer with a
color touchscreen display – the current prototype uses the
Compaq iPAQ™ 3650. Each visitor obtains information
about the objects in a room through a visual interface based
Figure 1. Electronic guidebook and headset.
on imagemaps. The interface shows one complete wall in a
given room (Figure 1, center); visitors rotate through the
four walls of each room using a hardware navigation button
and switch rooms using software radio buttons. To play an
audio description of a given object, the visitor taps the
object in the imagemap. Targets are not continuously
highlighted, and not all of the objects have audio
descriptions associated with them; when a tap fails to hit a
target, the guidebook briefly highlights all of the available
targets (Figure 1, lower left), a technique we call tap tips
[5].
Eavesdropping
Sotto Voce supports synchronized sharing of descriptive
audio content between pairs of visitors. The audio content
is presented through headsets to reduce the impact on
others in the environment. Since our goal is to enhance copresent
interaction, the system does not support audio
communication between the paired visitors themselves.
From a given visitor’s perspective, eavesdropping works as
follows. If visitor A selects an object in the guidebook, he
or she always hears the associated audio clip. If A is not
playing a clip, but visitor B is, then A’s device plays B’s
audio clip. Put more simply, clips are never mixed and A’s
selections always have priority on A’s device. This implies
that if A decides to play a clip by tapping on an object, A’s
device stops playing any eavesdropped audio and plays A’s
clip as requested. It also implies that if both A and B are
listening to their own selections and A’s clip ends, then A
will begin to hear exactly what B is hearing – A will hear
the remainder of B’s clip and not the clip in its entirety.
Each visitor can control the volume of eavesdropped clips
relative to the volume of personally-selected clips using
software radio buttons (Figure 1, upper left). The
eavesdropping volume can be set to “Loud” (same volume
for both), “Quiet” (reduced volume for eavesdropping), or
“Off” (no eavesdropping audio).
Audio playback is synchronized using an IEEE 802.11b
wireless local-area network. Since the audio content on
each device is identical, the devices simply send and
receive control messages (“start playing clip 4,” “stop
playing clip 12”). Synchronization enables a visitor to
place a companion’s reactions (talk, laughter, gestures, etc.)
in an appropriate interactional context.
Audio Content
Fifty-one objects in three rooms have audio descriptions.
The length and structure of the audio descriptions are
specifically designed to provide frequent and natural
opportunities for visitors to take conversational turns [26].
Visitors wear modified telephone headsets with a single,
over-ear earphone (Figure 1, right). We chose this
configuration to maximize ease of use, extended-wear
comfort, and the ability to converse with companions while
minimizing sound leakage [14]. To distinguish between
personally-selected and eavesdropped audio, we apply a
small amount of reverberation to the eavesdropped audio
content and support different relative volume levels (the
default setting, “Quiet,” was generally used by visitors).
METHOD AND PARTICIPANTS
We studied our device in use at Filoli, a Georgian Revival
historic house located in Woodside, California
(http://www.filoli.org/). With the permission of the
management, we took our technology to the house on four
consecutive “open days.” In the remainder of this section
we describe how we recruited people, the methods we used,
and our subsequent data analysis.
Recruiting
We advertised our study using signs located at the visitor
center and inside the house. We knew none of the potential
participants prior to meeting them at the house. Moreover,
potential participants were unaware of the study and the
technology prior to visiting Filoli. Inside the house,
visitors were approached by a “recruiter” who was
positioned outside the first room described by the
guidebook. The recruiter waited for pairs of visitors to
approach the room and then decided whether to ask them to
participate. Our decision to ask visitors to participate was
based on several factors including whether they seemed to
have time for the study (i.e., those not rushing through the
house), and whether they had any visible physical
impairments that would have made using a handheld
difficult (such as a cane which required one of their hands).
Over the course of the four days, we recruited 47 people
(one group of four, one group of three, and 20 groups of
two) to use the guidebook. This recruitment represents
about a 40% success rate (that is, about 60% of the people
approached declined our offer).
As an incentive to participate in this study, we offered
people the use of the technology. (Visitors to Filoli receive
a free paper guidebook, but no audio guide is currently
available.) In addition, we sometimes explained to visitors
that they would be able to see a part of the house that was
off-limits to the general public. The latter often served as
the initial hook, although after using the technology, many
visitors seemed equally as enthusiastic about the guidebook
as the opportunity to see a “private” space in Filoli.
Methods
Once recruited to the study, participants signed a consent
form and filled out a short questionnaire on basic
demographic information and their museum and
technological experience. The recruiter then introduced the
visitors to the interviewer. The interviewer gave the
visitors a guidebook, a headset, and a microphone (which
we used to record their conversations during their use of the
guidebook and afterwards in the interview). The
interviewer then gave a brief tutorial (approximately two to
three minutes) on how to use the guidebook including the
eavesdropping feature.
After the tutorial we asked the visitors to resume their visit
to Filoli and to find us when they had completed the three
rooms contained in the guidebook (in the sense that they
returned to their initial activity, this study is similar to that
conducted by Cheverst et al. [9]). During their exploration
of two of the three rooms, we used video cameras to record
their interactions with each other, the guidebook, and (on
some occasions) with other visitors and pairs of guidebook
users. We also used the guidebooks as logging devices;
each tap and press the user made was recorded by the
guidebook. Visitors typically took 15 to 20 minutes to
complete their visit.
After the visitors finished touring the specified rooms, the
interviewer invited the visitors to enter the private part of
the house for an interview that lasted between 10 and 30
minutes. The interview covered a number of topics, using a
semi-structured interviewing protocol. In addition to
asking about their experience with the guidebook in general
and the eavesdropping feature specifically, we also
encouraged the couples to tell us about their typical
museum experience including their current visit to Filoli.
By asking about their current visit, both with and without
the guidebook, we were able to establish whether they were
regular museum goers, and sometimes whether they had a
particular “method” for touring. Being in the middle of a
tour, visitors often had fresh experiences to discuss and a
ready baseline for reflecting on their own behavior.
Analysis
We used several techniques to gather and analyze the data
from this study. In this paper, we focus on findings from
the interview data. The interviews were designed to
optimize the ability of the participants to tell us what they
thought of the guidebook and how it affected their
experience. As such, the interviews relied on a semistructured
interview guide. In addition to focusing on
eliciting answers to specific questions, the interviews were
intended to draw out the thoughts and impressions of the
users’ experience with the guidebook.
Participants
In the previous section, we described how we recruited the
participants for this study. In this section, we discuss some
of the demographics of the participants.
Participants were asked to select an approximate age by
checking an appropriate age range. Although historic
houses are thought to attract older visitors, 53% were under
50; in fact, 21% were under 30. The other 47% ranged in
age from 50 to over 70.
It was not just the participants’ ages that varied. They also
had a variety of different backgrounds, careers, and
relationships with their companions. Most participants
came from California and nearly all were residents of the
United States, but two were visiting from England. Their
occupations also varied. Participants included a flight
attendant, an architect, a student, a meteorologist and a
housewife. Some of the pairs were friends, others were
family, and some were short-term acquaintances. Of the 47
participants. 13 were men; one man used the guidebook
alone.
For the rest of this study we will refer to visitor pairs by an
assigned number. P1 represents a pair of visitors. P11-12
refers to a group of three. P11 is a pair of visitors that
shared eavesdropping guidebooks, while P12 used a
guidebook by himself. P23-24 refers to a group of four,
who used the guidebooks in two pairs but toured together
as a group of four.
REVISITING “THE VISIT”
The data we collected from the interviews supports vom
Lehn et al.’s assertion that museum visits contain many rich
practices [23]. In our study, visitors integrated the
guidebook and its functions into their activities. The
guidebook both shaped the visitors’ activities by providing
various information and features, and made it possible for
the visitors to appropriate its functionality in the pursuit of
these activities.
In this section we describe four activities in which visitors
engaged while using the guidebook: shared listening,
independent use, following, and checking in. In many
cases, the visitors used the guidebook for more than one of
these activities, although their interview comments often
focused on the activities that seemed most salient to them
(typically what they perceived as their dominant activities,
which should not be interpreted as the entirety of their
activities). In addition to describing these activities, we
highlight how social features of the paired companions and
of the public, historic home setting influenced visitors’
guidebook use.
Shared Listening
Sotto Voce is designed to facilitate interaction among
companions. One of the primary ways it achieves this is by
allowing paired companions to listen to the other’s
guidebook as well as their own by using the eavesdropping
feature. We call this activity shared listening.
Characteristically, shared listening occurs when a pair has
their devices set to eavesdropping; states of shared listening
could last a relatively long time —some couples reported
listening to each other for the entire visit— or just a few
minutes. (We will describe shorter periods of listening-in,
and unidirectional listening in later sections).
Previous studies of our guidebook have shown that shared
listening can facilitate conversations. The guidebook
enables shared listeners to engage in mutual conversation
by giving them activity cues – information about what and
when to talk to their companion [4, 26]. This study
reinforces these previous findings and extends our
understanding of visitors’ social motivations to engage in
shared listening activity. For example, P13 described
shared listening as “the best” and volunteered that they
never turned the eavesdropping off. They described two
reasons for engaging in shared listening: a desire to learn
about their companion’s interests and to enrich their
conversations. The desire to learn about their companion’s
interest stemmed from the fact that one person was familiar
with the house, while the other was new to it. The new
person listened to what the familiar person selected, while
the familiar person found it interesting to discover to what
objects the new person was attracted.
Visitors were aware of how the guidebook’s information
enriched their conversations. As one pair described “we
were more selective about our conversation. It was more
about objects, paintings, and furniture, rather than
‘wouldn’t you like to entertain in that room?’” A similar
experience was reported by P3 who felt they had more indepth
interactions in the rooms with the guidebook because
the guidebook content gave them more to talk about.
Shared listening also had the effect of bringing paired
visitors closer together socially. For example, P9
experimented with shared listening and described a feeling
of togetherness expressed in the following quote: “that’s
what I liked about it, to be– to, to know that we’re listening
to the same thing but not have it, you know, everybody in
the whole room, so that was really fun.” For this couple,
Sotto Voce reinforced their social bond by giving them a
shared secret, one that simultaneously bought them closer
together and distinguished them as a group apart from all
other visitors.
While observational data was useful in determining when
the eavesdropping was facilitating visitor interaction, the
interviews have been particularly helpful in understanding
the cases where it did not. Visitors proved to be quite
articulate in their expression of the relevant factors. In the
remainder of this subsection, we provide some illustrative
examples.
While paired visitors who engaged in shared listening may
have felt distinguished from their fellow museum-goers,
they did not lose an awareness of others in the public
setting. Specifically, some couples who engaged in shared
listening described not talking because of the presence of
other visitors (as observed by [23] also). As P13 explained,
“We talked a little bit, of course, when we were the only
ones in the room, but if there had been other people in the
room we would have been quiet.”
Other couples who engaged in shared listening activity
expressed a motivation to do so because it matched their
usual way of visiting a museum together. For one husband
and wife pair, P24, using the eavesdropping mode seemed
to fit their natural practice. As the husband described, “We
sort of have a ten foot rope, an invisible rope attached to
the two of us, so the eavesdropping was perfect.” And as
his wife went on to explain, their museum visiting practice
is also influenced by the presence of other people in the
room: “We try not to talk at...well because we don’t want
to be distracting to other people, we do use a little bit of
sign language, hand signals.”
Sensitivity to others in the room was not the only factor
motivating couples to minimize their talk. P19 also selfreported
a desire to minimize talking while using the
guidebooks, because of the guidebook’s audio. They both
reported sometimes prioritizing the guidebook’s audio over
talking which supports an earlier finding that whether or
not visitors were engaged in shared listening activity, their
talk was organized around their listening activity with the
guidebook’s audio descriptions [26].
In fact, some visitors expressed a feeling of becoming
absorbed into the listening activity. As P19 described “I
wasn’t asking her too much, I was trying to push my
buttons as fast as possible ... I was focusing on getting the
little stories out.” Couples cited their reasons for becoming
so activity focused on external time constraints for their
visit as well as a curiosity about the guidebook’s
informative descriptions. On reflecting on her activities
with the guidebook and her companion, one member of P19
characterized her physical activity as “go and then come”
in the sense that she spent time examining objects alone
and then returning and talking with her companion. This
data corroborates prior findings about the activity contour
of listening to an audio description where conversation both
sets up for and reflects back on the listening to an audio
description [26].
Independent Use
Several visitors reported switching off the eavesdropping
feature either temporarily or entirely. Not all visitors come
to a historic house to engage in social interaction, so it is
not surprising that social factors (primarily, but not
exclusively, among the paired visitors) heavily influenced
the decision to adopt this mode of guidebook activity.
Here, we give a few examples in which visitors articulated
some of the factors relevant to their experience.
The degree of social closeness between the paired visitors
impacted their decision to use the guidebooks
independently. Predictably, we found cases where weak
social links made shared activity less interesting. For
example, two couples (P1 and P20) who were only
acquaintances switched off the eavesdropping feature and
reported leaving it off for almost their entire visit. One
member of P1 recalled that partway through the first room,
“that’s when we said, ‘let’s turn this thing [eavesdropping]
off.’” Turning off the eavesdropping seemed to fit their
visiting mode which they described as “we were more or
less going on our own.” In the case of P20, one person
continued to select objects from the guidebook, while the
other stopped using the guidebook entirely, expressing a
preference to “wander and be less structured.”
Individual preferences and personal museum visiting
practices influenced others to engage in independent
guidebook use. Again, situations arose that made shared
activity unlikely, because the visitors were predisposed to
independent activity. For example, one member of P10
reported turning off the eavesdropping feature momentarily
because she “just wanted to do it myself.” P18,
experienced museum visitors who knew each other well,
turned off the eavesdropping feature, citing their
established museum visiting strategy as the cause. They
described that while visiting a museum, “We don’t really
stick together much,” and “he’ll usually be five or six
rooms ahead of me, or vice versa.” To illustrate their
independent visiting style further, they told us of a case
where they had gotten lost in a cathedral because they were
so far apart. This led to a revision in their strategy which
involved determining in advance how easy it would be to
get lost and factoring that in to determine how far apart
they would allow themselves to get! Given their visiting
needs, it is hardly surprising that the eavesdropping feature
was perceived as bringing them too close together; as one
put it “he was nipping at my heels ... I wanted to get back
to my own program.”
In at least one case, additional factors overrode both
individual preferences and established museum visit
practices. P11, part of a group of three (P11-12), elected to
use the guidebook together because they felt that they
talked when they visited museums. Moreover, they had the
feeling that P12’s museum visiting strategy was solo,
saying, “He’s always miles ahead of us.” However, during
the post-use interview, they reflected on their day’s visit in
general and decided that while they do often talk at
museums, “We weren’t really talking that much this
morning.” Here, the visitors’ interactional practices that
had been established that day predisposed them to continue
with the same kind of visit. In other words, although their
selection was based on their beliefs about how they
normally visit museums, their guidebook use was
predominantly shaped by their museum visiting mode on
that particular day.
The fact that visitors engaged in independent guidebook
use did not mean that they had entirely independent visits.
That is, independent guidebook use did not preclude the
visitors’ conversational interaction. Couple P16 reported
engaging in independent guidebook use for extended
periods of time without it interfering with their ability to
talk to each other during the visit. They described using
several communicative strategies to accomplish this:
instructing each other (“oh listen to this”), pointing out an
object when they thought their companion might be
listening, and waiting for the other to select a description so
they could initiate a conversation upon its completion. In
some cases, visitors’ desire to interact overcame additional
social factors as well as their lack of coordinated activity.
For example, P2, a daughter and her mother’s friend, selfreported
turning off the eavesdropping feature for most of
their visit. They partly explained this as due to the
potential for embarrassment – one member compared her
current guidebook and headset to “my little girl who’s five
has her CD [head]sets and when she wants to talk to us she
starts yelling ... so I was afraid I would start talking really
loud (laughs).” Yet, despite this, they continued to obtain
information from the guidebook and reported some talking
(e.g., “we were laughing about that one story, though.”)
Following
Several couples reported having engaged in an activity
where one person followed the other’s activity by using the
guidebook in eavesdropping mode. This was often
characterized by one person dedicated to operating the
guidebook, and the other person exclusively eavesdropping.
The person “driving” the object selection on the guidebook
the room was “followed” by the eavesdropping listener.
Following focused on operating the guidebook, and should
not be equated with the visitors’ processes of selecting
which objects they viewed during their museum
experience. Although a number of couples reported similar
following behaviors, they also described a variety of
different technical and social options to achieve this type of
visit experience.
P22, a mother-daughter couple, explained that the daughter
turned the eavesdropping feature off while her mother left
it on and used it to listen in. As the daughter said. “She had
to eavesdrop on me, and I was controlling.” Beyond their
technical decision, P22 also made a social decision. The
mother observed that her daughter would check to ensure
that both parties had heard her selection. Based on these
decisions, they self-reported having engaged in the
following activity for “pretty much the whole way.”
By contrast, other couples that described the following type
of usage did not report any kind of technical decision to
turn off one guidebook. For example, P7 explicitly
reported leaving themselves connected, but also described a
form of following behavior. In particular, one member of
P7 reported that “she did the work. I did the listening. It
was great.” She later explained that “[My companion] did
most of the functioning.” They also self-reported having a
very engaged visit. As one member put it “We like that
you could be interconnected.”
During the interview, the listener in P7 also offered a
potential explanation of why she in particular liked the
eavesdropping feature: “it works if you have somebody
that’s not as comfortable with [the guidebook technology]
as the other person.” Although expressed in general terms,
this may have been her personal reason for following, since
she also commented on her lack of technological
experience at other times during the interview.
However, despite any lack of experience with technology
P7 did report using the device in at least one way during the
interview. She described using her own guidebook to
switch walls. She explained that she did this so that “I saw,
you know, on my screen as well as what she was doing.”
The listener in P5, a father-son pair, also commented on his
lack of technological inexperience to explain his following
behavior. The adult son explained, “he directed mostly, I
just listened.” They did not describe how they had their
guidebooks configured. Instead, they described their
following behavior as coming from their initial adoption
practices. Specifically, when asked why they selected this
approach, they explained, “I was totally satisfied with what
was going on,” and “that’s the way we first did it so we just
continued to do it that way.”
One other couple also described a form of following
activity. Notably though, when one member of the couple
changed the configuration of the other person’s guidebook
the following activity was disrupted and subsequently
repaired. In this case, P15 a mother-daughter couple had
been engaged in following – the daughter was selecting
objects in the guidebook, and her mother “listened to a lot
of what she was listening to.” The practice was made
explicit when the daughter turned off her mother’s
eavesdropping function. But, as the daughter explained,
“she didn’t like that, and so she turned it back on.” In this
case, turning off the eavesdropping feature revealed their
following practice.
Checking In
The final use of the guidebook that couples described was
to “check in” on their companion. Checking in was
typically a short activity, but one that was focused on
updating or maintaining some type of shared context with
their companion. In other words, with its eavesdropping
feature on, the guidebook provided individuals with a
resource to coordinate their actions with the actions of their
companions. Participants described three reasons for
checking in: to elicit information about their companion’s
state, to find out whether their companion was listening to
descriptions of specific objects, and to monitor (a longerduration
type of checking in).
Several couples described using the eavesdropping to check
in and get information about the “state” of their companion.
For example, one member of P17 described the
eavesdropping: “it was helpful if I was done, to find out
where [companion’s name] was.” In addition to
coordinating the completion of the guidebook tour, a
number of couples also coordinated their movement from
one room to another (also seen in, e.g., vom Lehn’s
observations of museum visiting practices [23]). In fact
one member of P18, the highly experienced, largely
independent museum visiting couple, reported “I was
curious as to when he was ready to move on to the Study.”
The second kind of checking in that was reported to us
focused on objects. In one case, P8 described an instance
where her companion, her husband, had mentioned an
object. Curious about the object, she turned her
eavesdropping on and checked what was playing on his
guidebook. As she put it “I turned it on, to see, cause he
had said something [about an object]. I turned it on to see
what he was listening to.”
One member of P6 described another type of checking in
akin to monitoring. In her case, she was checking in on her
husband. Specifically, she pointed out an object and then
turned on the eavesdropping feature, later recalling that “I
wanted my husband to hear it so in order for hi– for me to
know that he got it right.” Her desire to check in on her
husband came from the fact that he had suffered a stroke.
Part of their on-going rehabilitation was to encourage him
to undertake various activities, and she viewed the
guidebook as part of that. So she used eavesdropping
“because I wanted him to do it for himself. He should do it
for himself ... it’s a marvelous learning tool.”
The checking in activities described above appear to have
had (according to the participants) a fairly short duration.
Two couples described longer checking in activities. These
resemble reports of monitoring activities, such as those
described by Heath and Luff in their study of London
Underground controllers [16].
One couple, P3 described checking in on his companion
because he did not want to lose the awareness of where she
was while he went and did something else. In this case,
one member of P3 wanted to take pictures of a different
room than the one he was currently in with his companion.
While he was taking pictures, he continued eavesdropping
so that he would have information about what his
companion was doing. He added that without the ability to
listen to his companion’s activities, he felt that he would
have hurried to finish taking pictures sooner in order to
return to her.
Another person, one member of P23, also described a
checking in activity of some duration. In this case, the wife
left eavesdropping on and reported long periods of
checking in on her husband, in addition to pursuing her
own object selection. However, she used eavesdropping to
wait until he had listened to objects she had already heard
and then she would engage him in conversations about
those objects. This came as a complete surprise to him
during the interview (“now I know why you knew about the
books at the same time”), although it clarified for him why
she had known the descriptions to which he was listening.
DISCUSSION
In the previous section we presented four activities people
reported engaging in during their visit: shared listening,
independent use, following and checking in. In addition to
describing each activity, we highlighted the role of the
guidebook, the companion, museum visiting strategies and
strangers in shaping that activity. In this section, we reexamine
two key CSCW questions in light of this study:
adoption and awareness.
Guidebook Adoption
CSCW research has long known the difficulties of
groupware technology [15]. Sotto Voce potentially faced
both groupware and individual adoption challenges. In this
section we describe how visitors adopted features of the
technology, especially the groupware features. We then
discuss how paired visitors could adopt different features of
the guidebook and still have collaborative experiences. We
begin by addressing one general adoption challenge for
guidebook technology in any historic home, namely, visitor
demographics.
Typical visitors to historic homes (older middle-aged
women) tend to have little technological experience. Our
study revealed that the “typical” historic house visitor had
not used handheld technology before, but this made no
difference to successful adoption. In fact, although some of
the strongest and most repeated comments about lack of
technological experience came from visitors in this
demographic, some of the most enthusiastic interview
comments came from these same people. Their enthusiasm
sprang from both individual and group use features of the
guidebook.
Most visitors (45 out of 47) enjoyed the visual object
selection and audio clip features. Typical comments about
visual selection focused on how it is easier to select an
object from a picture than to determine which object is
being described in a text narrative. Typical comments
about the audio focused on the clarity of the voice and the
short length of the clips. These features made the
guidebook desirable to use. P18, the experienced museumgoing
couple who had toured many houses and buildings,
thought the guidebook was one of the best, if not the best,
they had ever used.
This high rate of adoption, and visitor enthusiasm, was
particularly gratifying in light of the demographic
challenge we anticipated. It also suggested that the
guidebook software was robust enough to ensure a pleasant
experience – no small challenge in itself. Finally,
successful adoption suggested that after little instruction,
typically lasting between two and three minutes, the
guidebook was easy enough to use that almost everybody
found a way of incorporating it into the visit.
The adoption of the groupware feature of the guidebook –
the eavesdropping – was more sensitive to social features
of the visit and the setting. Specifically, our findings
suggest three factors influencing whether and how couples
would adopt the eavesdropping: the social relationship of
the couple, the nature of the current visit, and whether or
not the couple has a typical museum visiting strategy.
The social relationship between the paired visitors
influenced the use of eavesdropping. Those who were
merely acquaintances self-reported that they adopted the
guidebook fairly independently, which included turning off
the eavesdropping for some time during the visit.
However, once the system was configured for independent
use, all but one person in these acquaintance-only pairs
continued to use the guidebook.
One pair of acquaintances also said that they would use the
eavesdropping if they had a different type of social
relationship. When asked about their reason for
independent use, P2 offered “if we were a couple, like your
mom and dad might wanta do it together.” Comments like
this suggest that their relationship as acquaintances
influenced how they used the eavesdropping and that a
different social relationship could have resulted in
eavesdropping being used more.
Another influence that was offered during some interviews
was the nature of the current visit prior to using the
guidebooks. Although P11 (the group of three) selfselected
who would share guidebooks based on their sense
of who likes to talk with each other in museums, they also
described their visit in the house that day as being fairly
independent, and they reported the continuation of the
independent pattern with the guidebooks. Another factor in
eavesdropping use was whether couples had strategies for
visiting museums together. Couples with defined strategies
often explained not just their initial adoption, but also their
continued use of the eavesdropping feature in those terms.
For example, P18’s museum visiting strategy consisted of
independent exploration while retaining some sense of their
companion’s location (to avoid getting lost). They selfreported
turning eavesdropping off during independent
exploration while turning it on for checking in. P24 self-
reported that the use of eavesdropping fit their “invisible
rope” museum strategy. They used eavesdropping as a
resource to achieve a shared experience. P7, while not
having such a strongly defined strategy, also used
eavesdropping and explained that when they went to
museums they valued their interactions with each other.
The eavesdropping allowed them to preserve those
interactions, while providing more information about
objects on which they could base their conversations.
Our data suggest that some paired visitors adopted different
configurations of the individual and groupware features of
the guidebook and yet still had a collaborative experience.
Intuitively, one might expect groupware like this guidebook
to be adopted symmetrically. By this, we mean that the
technology would work only if both parties used the same
features. However, as our participants demonstrated,
asymmetric adoption is possible.
For example, the self-reported technologically
inexperienced users (P5 and P7, for example) described
initially leaving their more technologically experienced
partner to work the guidebook while they listened and
followed. In other words, they adopted the groupware
feature of eavesdropping, while letting their partners use
the individual features of the guidebook. This was even
more explicit in couples such as P15 and P22; one member
turned the eavesdropping off and the other continued to
leave it on, yet they still talked. These examples illustrate
that paired visitors could adopt features differently and yet
still use the guidebook and the eavesdropping as a resource
for sharing their visit.
Types of Awareness
It has long been recognized that awareness of others creates
opportunities for collaboration. Our study findings suggest
that awareness of companions also matters away from the
office. Individuals reported having awareness and
responding to their companions and also the presence of
others.
Like previous studies of collaboration [10], we found that
individuals reported using the eavesdropping to get the
content and character of the companion’s activity.
Specifically, individuals reported using the eavesdropping
to find out what objects their companions were listening to
(content). They also used eavesdropping to determine
whether their companion was listening to descriptions and
where in the room their companion was, and whether they
might be close to being finished (character).
Self-reported use of the guidebook also illustrates another
form of awareness: the presence or potential presence of
strangers in the room. As vom Lehn et al. [23] have
observed, people react not just to their companions, but
also to others around them. Our observations support their
finding, but also suggest that visitors react not just to the
presence of strangers, but also to the potential presence of
others.
For example, P24 reported a general museum visiting
strategy of using hand-signals instead of speech in order to
accommodate the potential presence of other people not
just today. Another couple, P2, commented that they were
concerned about talking loudly while using the guidebook
because “people are walking around us.” The interview did
not clarify whether it was the actual or potential presence of
other people that influenced them, but their comment
illustrated how visitors were aware of other people.
While previous studies have often focused on the
awareness colleagues need in order to collaborate, some
studies have observed that people are aware of others
around them. For example, Isaacs et al. [19] report that
office colleagues used IM when they wanted to talk without
disturbing others. Grinter and Eldridge [13] find that
teenagers sometimes use SMS to avoid disturbing other
family members. Similar to these findings, some of our
study participants reported not wanting to disturb others in
the museum, and that awareness affected how they behaved
when using Sotto Voce. Unlike studies of offices and
homes, the others in the museum were unknown to the
couple. This resembles Goffman’s idea of “decorum”
which he described as in a front region where an audience
may be present, individuals (a team) are likely to
incorporate certain standards into their performance “while
in visual or aural range of the audience but not necessarily
engaged in talk with them” ([12], p107).
Strategies for technology adoption based on awareness of
potential strangers have also been reported by Palen et al.
[21]. Specifically, their study finds that people who had
just purchased a mobile phone were sensitive to using it in
public settings because they did not want to disturb
strangers. However, the authors report that over time, those
same mobile phone owners found that they did use it in
public and worried less about disturbing others.
Comparisons of Sotto Voce with mobile phone use raise a
number of questions. First, would sustained use of Sotto
Voce cause individuals to change, or worry less, about the
presence of others and report modifying their own
guidebook behavior? Second, can users ever achieve
sustained use? Unlike a mobile phone, Sotto Voce is a
loaned and not owned technology, so it may never achieve
enough use for people to evolve and adapt their behaviors
based on extended “familiarity” with the technology.
Finally, what kind of public space is a museum in general,
and a historic house in particular, and how susceptible to
change are the museum-specific variations of what
Goffman describes as “decorum” (for example, the use of
so-called “museum voice”)? All of these questions will
become increasingly important for CSCW as groupware
leaves the office and enters public life.
CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented findings from a study of the use
of a guidebook in a historic home. The guidebook
facilitated four kinds of activity: shared listening,
independent use, following and checking in. We described
how the guidebook’s individual and collaborative features
were adopted, and how the adoption was influenced by
factors including the social relationship of the paired
visitors, the current visit, and strategies for visiting
museums. We also discussed how the adoption of those
features was up to each individual, and sometimes when
they adopted and used different features they still ended up
having collaborative experiences. Finally, we showed that
the guidebook facilitated awareness of companions, and its
use was shaped by awareness of others.
Museums are a rich public space in which to examine
technology. In addition to drawing a visitor base with a
wide range of backgrounds and technology experience,
museums also contain rich social conventions that shape
and influence technology adoption and use. This paper has
illustrated some of those conventions and how they
influence the nature of collaboration away from the office.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the staff of Filoli Center, especially
Tom Rogers and Anne Taylor. In addition to admiring
their courage, we thank them for their generous donation of
time and resources. We also want to thank the visitors who
gave us some of their leisure time to try Sotto Voce. Amy
Hurst participated in this work while she was an intern at
the Palo Alto Research Center.
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