No-code software enables in-house museum staff to create interactive digital exhibits indistinguishable from outsourced software development.
Interactive digital exhibits were once considered a luxury option for museums. The constraint was an unsolvable tension between expertise and budget. Few, if any, museums possessed the developer talent for in-house content creation or had the budget for outsourcing.
Further complicating matters was the outsourcing cost itself. Museums weren’t exactly beggars - grants, donations, and budget reallocation did eventually make modest digital investment possible for some - but when the only option was to hire an outside party, museums didn’t have much choice either. Agencies could set their price, and it wasn’t at a discount.
The key to unlocking this puzzle is empowering creative teams within museums to deliver interactive digital exhibits themselves. Giving them a no-code platform would make it possible to create modern and engaging interactive digital content with the look and feel of custom coding.
That’s what Intuiface is and why it is used by museums worldwide, including the Museum of Flight in the US, the Queensland Museum in Australia, and the National Library of Scotland.
With Intuiface, museums don’t just avoid the high costs of outsourcing. When exhibit experts are in charge, project timelines are compressed, and scope is never sacrificed because of development delays. Changes can be made in real-time, while iteration reviews can be measured in hours and days, not weeks.
To understand how Intuiface works, it’s best to start with an understanding of what is meant by “interactive digital experiences.” What does it mean to say that digital content is interactive? It means an audience member can actively express their desires using touch, voice, gesture, ID reader, or personal mobile device, or passively influence content via means such as computer vision and sensors. Digital content reacts to the audience input, resulting in a feedback loop.
Intuiface’s experience editor - called Composer - enables creative teams to build these interactive projects from scratch using a wide variety of Lego-like building blocks that can be combined in infinite ways. Some of these building blocks represent media types, like images, videos, documents, 3D models, websites, and audio files. Other building blocks enable users to combine visual and auditory elements in uniquely creative ways. The result is control over every pixel of the design, storyboard, and layout. There are no template restrictions and no pre-built app limitations.
This ability to control the user interface is just the first step. Next is the ability to highlight events of interest and how the experience should react to those events. In Intuiface’s parlance, these are known as triggers and actions. The trigger is the event - when the image is tapped, when the video is played, etc. The action is the response to that event - turn to page seven, open a particular URL, rotate the 3D model, etc. There are hundreds of triggers and actions within Intuiface.
If Intuiface just stopped here, there would already be enough for exhibit teams to create educational modules, quizzes, video libraries, and more. All this without ever writing a line of code. Intuiface offers far more, such as built-in support for Web APIs, making it possible to connect Intuiface-based experiences to any external data source, business logic, or device. This could be the museum’s own digitized archives, Intuiface’s own Headless Content Management System, or any other third-party resource considered critical to project success.
Then there is Intuiface’s agnostic approach to hardware and breadth of platform support. For example, for in-venue deployments, Intuiface users can select any display manufacturer without concern and choose from multiple operating systems, including Windows, Android, Chrome OS, Samsung Tizen, and more. Plus, the same content built for exhibit in-venue can be deployed to the web without additional work or training.
With additional capabilities such as remote experience deployment and robust analytics encompassing both data collection and visualization, Intuiface is a one-stop-shop for every imagined digital engagement within a museum. Download its free 28-day trial to try everything out yourself.
Contact: Geoff Bessin, bessin@intuiface.com