Enhancing Museum Visit Experience

Initially, we started our research by reviewing studies on museum visits, the audiences, museum offer and we gathered statistics. Our secondary research insights are following:

• The price of the entrance tickets is not a concern — which is opposed to one of our assumptions
• Active professionals are visiting museums the most — we assumed that this group would be seniors
• The number of visitors is declining in traditional museums but it is increasing in science-related museums
• Visiting museums is mainly a social activity — which approved our assumption
• Nowadays many museums offer virtual tours — our last assumption

Furthermore, we have led a series of interviews with museum-goers in order to understand their motivations, expectations, beliefs, blocking factors and overall experiences in modern museum.

• Most of our interviewees would visit museums more frequently if they had more time (opening hours limitation)
• They are visiting museums to extend their knowledge, to admire art and the place itself
• All of our responders have confirmed one of our main assumptions: people go to the museums to socialise
• Our interviewees’ pain points: waiting lines and crowds are the biggest obstacle to visiting a museum
• Interviewees also responded positively to the interactive activities, e.g. augmented reality, or special mobile applications designed for visitors, although none of them is interested in the virtual visits proposed on the museums’ websites

We have worked on the affinity diagram in order to gather and organise our findings from the interviews as well as secondary research findings. We have found the pattern and trends that we named accordingly. The Pain Points that we have found concern the accessibility limitations, opening hours, time limitations, and crowds. The most important findings were socialising, learning, and interactive aspect of a museum visit.

Superficially it might seem that nobody has time to visit museums, but upon closer inspection the user research made clear that there are divergent motivations of users. Creating a persona helped bring some clarity to those motivations and pain points.

By creating and exploring the journey map of our persona and his tasks, we uncovered key emotional moments that our solution has to address.

Crazy 8’s: a fast sketching exercise that challenged us to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. The goal was to push beyond our first idea, frequently the least innovative, and to generate a wide variety of solutions to our challenge.

Worst idea: a lateral thinking method which is very much about standing back, looking at the big picture and understanding concepts. It also required us to focus on the parts that have perhaps been overlooked, challenging assumptions and seeking alternatives.

Ideation leads us to a possible solution, which could be a mobile application that allows the user to find a museums on the map, check how busy are museums, buy tickets, interact with others, find more info about the exhibition or check the past and currents event in the waiting line.

We tried to create a simple User Flow, by representing the avenues that can be taken when using an app. This User Flow informed by our research, organisationally depicts the three key task streams that the future prototype would focus on: onboarding and registration, navigating on the map, getting the museum's info and selecting activities.

We created the wireframes in order to demonstrate our idea and run the User Tests. We wanted to explore design patterns common among apps in the culture sector. We took all feedbacks which allowed us to better understand how users expected to coplete the tasks we were focusing on.

Outcome

The goal of our project were to represent graphically our user-centred solution in low to mid fidelity prototype. I feel like we laid a foundation for the more fully realisable high-fidelity prototype. I have build few hi-fi screens, visible below, to practice my UI skills and to realise this additional step which makes project more complet. For the future itineration, I would build and interactive prototype and study how the user is completing the tasks we were focusing on. I would likely have a dialog with users about what they expected and which adjustment has to be done.

• Teamwork, time constraints could be overcomed only when we cooperate and share tasks when needed, as well as brainstorm and ideate
• We had some creative ideas during the ideation, but after identifying they are not addressing our user pain points properly, we had to try another method
• Share, even the bad ideas, they might become a part of the solution design
• Trust the process, jumping ahead to solution ideas at the beginning of the project was only a distraction