The museum visit is one of the few experiences that have largely remained unaltered by the digital revolution. AV/VR solutions on the market are still obtrusive and distracting. Placards feel impersonal and uninspired when measured against the stream of tailored content in our pockets. Data from the DCMS show that people are as hungry as ever for art, but are finding new ways to engage with it.
Museum attendance is down 30% from pre-pandemic levels. This trend began in 2016.
Educational visits among under 18s saw a 6.9% decrease in 2019.
In that same year there was a 24% increase in usage of apps related to the arts.
Through a user-centered design process I ensured I was keeping sight of real museum-goers pain points, and not wasting resources on nice-to-haves.
Understand how different people experience museum visits
Specify their pain points and best approach to address them
Design possible solutions and test them with museum-goers
Evaluate findings and reiterate on previous designs applying new insights
Scalable Intimacy
I interviewed 5 museum-goers aged 18 to 26 who were very emphatic and detailed about their dissatisfaction with their recent visits. They all sought different experiences in different venues, but encountered a lot of the same struggles.
Make it memorable
All stated interest towards trivia and anecdotes about the artwork, rather than the purely historical details usually reported by the placards, which were described as "cold" and "trite".
Total immersion
Most participants had a desire for more in-depth stylistic and thematic analyses of the artworks to get a deeper understanding of the artists' emotions and intentions.
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Some key words came up repeatedly in our conversations:
An unobtrusive accompaniment app that ties digital communities to the physical space through location-based user contributions that are modularly composable into customised tours.
Competitors are utterly focused on narrow slivers of the market, leaving domain for a product that allows user contributions to the platform, therefore making expansion scalable, multicultural, and community driven.
Opportunities:
Leverage Community
My goal was to compare the immersiveness of the artwork appreciation experience offered by three key competitor apps.
After a first round of testing on my lo-fi prototype, I refined the structure and interconnection of primary and secondary flows and put together a mid-fi prototype with most core functionalities.
Crazy Eights helped me jump start my divergent thinking. Most of the solutions considered became actual features of Trove.
I used storyboards to further empathise with museum-goers and consider the potential edge cases they could be in.
Unmoderated, 10-15 minutes.
Italy, rented space.
4 museum-goers, aged 21 to 30. One user of assistive technologies due to dyslexia.
Implement social functionalities without breaking experience immersion.
Participants found that the experience matched their expectations and were able to access most core features. Two common complaints were the lack of filtering options to weed out uninteresting posts, and some difficulty in creating a new post.
Into The Treasure Trove
Trove has been an exercise in moderation: the social features of the platform need to quietly orbit around the physical museum visit, but in my first iterations they ended up becoming a gravitational centre for the visitor’s attention. I wanted to believe that users would use the app like any tool, and set it aside once they got what they needed, but the reality is that even while standing in the company of the Mona Lisa, we might still fall for infinite scroll.
As a lover of arts & humanities this was an exciting portfolio piece. To test it I collaborated with a staff member at my local museum and we'd like to see this implemented to further stretch and refine the idea. The bottleneck is the cost of image recognition tech, but smaller installations could be serviced through the use of QR codes.
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