Tours are the lifeblood of the Cuseum Visitor App. They provide context and help educate and entertain your visitors. This is a quick guide on creating a Tour Flow, as well as a some best practices and an example tour to help you succeed!

Our tour system has been designed to encourage flexibility in storytelling styles and content types, but there are still a few best practices to help ensure you get the most out of our platform.

First let's talk about the different parts of a Cuseum Tour.

TYPES OF MODELS

Object Model

An object should be viewed as a physical item; it can be a painting, sculpture, tool, or even a fountain. The idea is that the object has a set of attributes and information that is uniquely relevant to the object. This ensures an object will be clear to the visitor if you include it in multiple tours . This is also where you store information such as provenance or history.

We recommend not using the Object model if you wish to serve different information about an object for different tours. We recommend using the Multiple Points of Interest model instead.

Custom Page Model

A custom page is what we consider the kitchen sink model to help support anything that doesn't fit within the other models. It is an embedded webpage which provides maximum flexibility including the capability to embed YouTube videos, Instagram posts. They can also be linked to objects and tour stops so you can include auxiliary information such as important contextual information. Think of it as a Wikipedia page.

Stop Model

The stop model is the backbone of your tour. These are the physical locations a user will stop at when navigating through the linear tour. This can be a specific gallery, room, corner, or even piece. Please keep in mind: once a stop is created, it cannot be moved into another tour, only dragged-and-dropped within the tour it was created in.

They can also include Objects in the form of 'Points of Interest'. A good example of this is using a room as a stop that includes two paintings. You can store each painting as an object. As the visitor approaches the room they will see the stop, listen to the story about why the room is important and then have the ability (but not the obligation) to look at each painting separately. They can quickly jump back into the stop level and move on to the next area.

If you have an object that you wish to make into a stop, you can select the "Single Point of Interest" option from the Stop Page.

Directions Model

The directions model is structured to help you guide your visitor to the next stop. This can be a mixture of text and imagery, and is incredibly helpful when guiding a visitor to a new room, floor, building, or area.

We recommend keeping the directions as short as possible and using multiple direction models consecutively. They will load one after another and be present on the stop page to view at any time.

Tour Preview Page

This section gives your visitor a small preview of the tour. It will be the first thing a visitor sees and is intended to entice a visitor to initiate your tour.

It typically will include background information, tour length, starting location, and anything else that will help the visitor select the tour that is most appropriate for them.

Below is a simple flow chart illustrating how a tour is structured:

Here we have included three stops, one set of directions, three points of interest, and two custom pages. It's a good idea to layout how you wish to structure your tour before starting. One great way to do this is using the flow chart tool Draw.io.

Now that we have our Tour Hierarchy it is time to start creating our stops. First navigate to the tour flow section on the left navigation menu.

Now you will see the tour creation page. Let's add our first tour.

You will now be prompted to add the basic details of your tour. These details can be changed at anytime.

Now let's save our tour.

You will now see the following menu appear.

Let's add our first stop.

After clicking 'add stop' you will be prompted with a few choices.

Now click 'save' and we will begin editing our content. This will be very familiar to you if you have already created your objects as it is the same content editor. You can add text/media/image modules. We recommend starting with an image and any media you might have followed by a textual description.

Best Practices

Once you have saved your object you will see your stop in the side panel.

Let's add some directions to the next stop so our visitors know to use the left staircase.

Now we can add the rest of our stops and content and begin testing!

Now that we have created our tour it's a good time to test our content to ensure it is easy to understand and that your directions are clear and concise. We recommend inviting 3-5 people who have never used the tour before (preferably with little knowledge of the exhibit).

Have them start from stop 1 and see if they can navigate the space.

Watch the testers as they wander. Are they stopping where you wanted them to?

Time how long it takes to complete the tour. Is your initial estimate accurate?

Now that you have tested your tour it is time to release it. If you haven't already, navigate to the tour editor and select Visible in the details and click "save".

Congratulations! Your tour is now available in your app for your visitors to see!

To edit your tour, navigate to Content > Tours, and click on the Pencil icon

We are only a message away. You can email us at [email protected], or via our CMS widget. We are always happy to take a look at what you are working on and help you with any part of the content curation process!