Australian Sports Museum

A Day at the Races

A Day at the Races is an interactive where visitors are able to race other visitors with horses they have coloured in and named themselves.

With a race happening every few minutes, the competition is on!

I worked with Sandpit and illustrator Nick Lewis to create this stunning interactive that highlights non gambling aspects of racing.

Visitors are invited to sit down and colour in a horse template with as much detail as they desire. When finished, the visitor makes their way over to the onboarding booth. At this booth the visitor can scan and name their horse before it is sent to the big screen ready to compete.

At the siren the horses take off to race around the track, and the winner is given all the fanfare we could muster.

My involvement

For this project I assisted with:

Animation direction: I worked with developers and Lewis to determine the animation style across the whole experience.
User experience: determining how user's would interact and operate the installation. This was decided on prototypes created, technical limitations, and business concerns (i.e. reduce bottlenecking with school groups).
User interface design for the onboarding booths where users could name and scan their horse.
Testing and documentation: ensuring the museum staff could confidently operate the installation, and use the backend moderation portal.

A woman colouring in a horse template, and her daughter beside her stares at the screen where a race is taking place.

Some unique UX problems to solve

With a complex installation like this, there were new mishaps to address at every turn. Some of these challenges included choosing and assessing drawing materials, interaction timings, and how to use moderation to prevent offensive horses stealing the spotlight.

Drawing test showing how markers, pencil, and crayons looked after scanning.

What will users draw with?

When selecting drawing materials, we had several requirements to address:

Easy clean-up from the table.
Retaining colour quality after scanning.
Quick and user-friendly colouring experience.

Considering the time constraints of school groups, we opted for A5 paper templates, allowing for quicker colouring and cost-effective printing. After testing various options, we settled on crayons as they offered the optimal combination of speed, scanning conversion, and easy cleaning.

Using timings to tackle bottlenecking

I planned for timings from many angles, starting with how long it look to scan the horses as a fixed time. Through prototyping, and putting together an indicative timing animation.

As there were concerns about bottlenecking, paying attention to these timings allowed us to adjust the experience so six visitors could participate every five minutes.

Image of testing where a set of keys were scanned for racing instead of a horse template. On screen it shows a radial pattern with grey and white colour.

Crucial moderation

A Day at the Races was an unsupervised interaction with evolving moderation factors as it approached public release, addressing concerns such as swearing, genitalia, insensitive icons (swastikas, racial slurs 😳), and non-template items placed in the scanner.

To handle these situations, we ensured that horses with such content would appear on the screen without any colouring, indicating the issue was with the horse itself. Additionally, a backend platform allowed for horse removal, and in the worst-case scenario, offending horses would only be displayed for a maximum of three minutes.