Hartpury College

As well as vet schools Hartpury College near Gloucester is also a partner in the project.

On our tour we also visited them and saw all of the incredible facilities at the campus and hope that their participation will encourage a wider audience to use the museum than just vets, vet students and vet nurses.

We also hope that our partnership with Hartpury in the project may help to foster closer relationships in the future between other professions associated with the veterinary industry as well as stronger links with the vet schools, enabling academics to share teaching resources and methods.

Although the anatomy taught at Hartpury is predominantly equine there are also many comparative aspects which are incorporated into the course as this is fundamental to understanding the structure and function of different species.

Photo from Bristol: Live Anatomy Area

Understanding User–Centred Design

I attended the JISC Web Usability Workshop yesterday. Dr Stuart Church talked about the need for user-centred design, the multiple ways one can do user research, design and its evaluation. The session provided useful pointers for the design process of our museum. We will need to establish user needs and keep asking users throughout the development so that we indeed produce something they will appreciate. We already have a reasonable idea of what our main users (students and lecturers) need, but nothing beats testing the design by naïve individuals.

During our partner visits we have been collating their expectations and needs and these will also be taken into account. Each of our stakeholders has different priorities and the challenge will be to come to a suitable compromise. The suggested route to this common ground is focusing on the end users’ experience. The UX vision (user experience) statement I mocked up during the session is: “The OVAM project is developing a real experience online veterinary anatomy museum with easily accessible quality resources allowing appropriate knowledge acquisition by learners.” Now this will need to be adjusted but it is a start.

One thing we need to keep in mind, we are not our users, even though we know them reasonably well. There are many ways of finding out what users want and need and we have already done some focus groups and questionnaires but utilising our soon to be recruited student curators in helping us ascertain the best possible design will be crucial to success. I really liked the idea of using personas (a user archetype used to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions and even visual design) not only for the museum design but also possibly for helping users choose their route of navigation? Anyway, it is a food for thought.

The design and prototyping session re-iterated the fact that providing examples of possible designs for others to comment on is a must. We could use simple hand drawn sketches but I believe that something more interactive will be preferable. And the final product evaluation, well, it does seem quite far for now but we need to plan for the usability testing. I like the idea of expressing the user reactions as a tag cloud. At least we should not be struggling to find our potential users to test the resource; most of them are easily reached via our partners!

Further School Visits

We have now visited all the UK vet schools apart from Liverpool, where we will be heading to shortly, despite the snow and cold weather! Every where that we have been to has helped us brain storm the project and come up with some more fantastic ideas, such as a competition for students to submit a short powerpoint of their best anatomy work to encourage them to become involved. The best entries will then form part of the museum.

We are now working towards compiling a more complete list of resources which can be contributed towards the museum. As well as the more common place anatomical specimens we also saw some more unusual ones. Such as this incredible crocodile skeleton at Bristol and this enormous whale skeleton at Cambridge, which you can see in the photos below.

Over the next week we will be emailing the partners with a job description for the student curator position as well as an overall summary of all of the great ideas and thoughts that people came up with. Meanwhile we are working hard to put the framework of the project in place so that we will be ready to organise all the resources which are contributed.

Glasgow and Edinburgh Visits

Our partner visits started with the vet schools at Glasgow and Edinburgh and we received a very warm welcome and were truly inspired by the enthusiasm of all the staff members who came to meet us. As these were the first of the visits we weren't entirely sure what to expect and what form the meetings would take. Previously we had come up with an agenda with some key points that we wanted to cover and get peoples opinions on. These acted as points of discussion, leading to other very valuable suggestions and ideas from the partners. At each school our aim was to identify some potential resources for the museum and we were very impressed by the quality of what we saw, some of which had even been created by students.