The Ask Dashboard

The Dasboard in use, left of the screen. Image by the Brooklyn Museum

The Dashboard is web app that allows museum staff to respond to questions asked by visitors using the ask Mobile App. The Dashboard web app is written in Angular [1].

Museum staff are able to respond to questions in real time and look up art objects [2] that are near the visitor. The Dashboard also has wiki and Google Drive integration that allows staff to share information on how visitors are engaging the Museum’s colleciton.

Here are some blog posts about the development of this project:

• Benefitting from Code Prototypes - written by me, published on the Brooklyn Museum Tech Blog
• Learning from Agile Fails - written by my boss, published on the Brooklyn Museum Tech Blog. This post mentioned the Dashboard, specifically about how our expectations about users’ behavior collided with the reality of how they actually used this web app.

Notes

1. Why we chose Angular, My first impressions of Angular

2. The Dashboard also recieves data about a visitor’s location through the use of iBeacons, which are Bluetooth Low Energy devices that constantly broadcast its own id. The mobile app then sends this ID along with the visitor’s question. This ID is associated with a specific location and objects in the collection.