Barley Hall Volunteer Training Guide

The situation

Barley Hall is a reconstructed medieval townhouse in the centre of York. Its volunteers guide visitors through the rooms, the stories, the history. They are the visitor experience. Their current training comes as a long, text-heavy written pack: a thick booklet to take home, read and memorise before a shift.

The brief was to explore how that training experience could be improved. The problem wasn't the quality of the information, but that the current format assumed volunteers would sit down with a booklet and absorb it all at once. However, the majority of people do not learn that way. As a result, rather than just digitising the pack, the project shifted to designing for confidence, not more content.

What the research found

I ran a questionnaire with five participants and followed up with three structured interviews. Most were peers and classmates, with one or two older family members included to get a wider range of digital confidence and learning preference. They weren't museum volunteers, which is a real limitation I'll come back to, but the age and experience range made accessibility a genuine constraint rather than an afterthought.

The pattern that came back across everyone was consistent. Dense paragraphs feel overwhelming. People learn in short bursts, not long study sessions. Clear structure builds confidence. And what people want when learning something like this isn't more information, but support in building enough confidence to actually use what they know. The existing pack gave you facts and detailed information, however that can be overwhelming especially to new volunteers.

Two people kept the design honest

I built two personas to represent the real range of volunteers. Margaret is a retired teacher with low to moderate tech confidence. She wants larger text, high contrast, optional audio narration, and to feel prepared before a shift without having to memorise everything. Callum is a student with high tech confidence who learns in short bursts and responds well to quizzes and realistic scenarios. Designing for both at the same time is what pushed the accessibility decisions to be real rather than superficial.

Mapping the current journey made the friction visible. Receive a long pack, try to memorise dense text, struggle to remember key facts mid-shift, lose confidence exactly when it matters. Even motivated volunteers would find it stressful.

The solution

Rather than digitising the existing pack, I restructured the experience around clarity, confidence and practical use. A mobile-first interactive guide, piloted on the Great Hall, one of the most prominent spaces on a Barley Hall tour. Mobile made sense for accessibility reasons and because it fits how people actually learn: on the bus, between things, in short sessions rather than one long sit-down. Five decisions did the real work:

• Bite-sized modules rather than long sections to sit through, short enough to fit in the gaps between other things, the way people actually study
• Tips over text. Contextual prompts on how to explain something out loud, not more content to absorb
• Scenario practice. Realistic visitor questions, answered in the volunteer's own words, because bridging knowing a fact and saying it out loud is the actual skill that matters
• Recognition over recall. Low-pressure quizzes built around feedback, not performance
• Accessibility throughout. Text size, contrast and audio narration all optional and easy to reach, not buried in settings

Where the decisions came from

Three existing products shaped specific choices. Duolingo's short, self-paced modules influenced the bite-sized structure: the idea that learning feels more achievable when progress comes in small increments rather than one long commitment. Instagram's bookmarking interaction influenced the save-and-revisit feature, a low-friction gesture most people already know, adapted so volunteers can quickly return to a specific section when preparing for a shift. Kahoot's low-pressure quiz format influenced the scenario practice: recognition over recall, feedback over assessment, confidence over performance. Each was a deliberate reference, not a feature list.

Testing and reflection

Because I didn't have access to real Barley Hall volunteers for testing, I assessed the prototype through a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's usability principles. It identified clear strengths: visible system status, consistent navigation, low reliance on recall. But it's an honest limitation. A heuristic evaluation tells you what an expert notices, not how a volunteer actually learns and retains information over time.

The sample size is the other thing worth naming. Five questionnaire responses and three interviews are enough to surface patterns, but the bigger issue is who those participants were. Peers and classmates are not Barley Hall volunteers. The older family members helped, but the real user group is older adults with varying tech confidence who are actually doing this job. The findings pointed in a clear direction, but whether they hold with the real user group is a different question.

If I were to continue this, the priority would be testing with actual Barley Hall volunteers in the weeks leading up to a shift, to see whether the app actually changes how prepared and confident they feel.