UX/UI | CHALLENGE

An Immersive Mobile Solution for Cultural Enthusiasts

A one-week journey (and some extra days of personal work) to develop a mobile solution to enhance museums’ connection, interaction, and engagement.

10 min readDec 3, 2023

Stepping into my first UX/UI Design bootcamp, our first challenge immediatly propelled Michel Dujardin, Takalema Bakate, Alejandro and I into the intricate crisis of museums and cultural exhibitions.In this post, I’ll share our one-week journey, including extra days of personal work, designing a mobile application to enhance museum engagement. I’ll discuss our process, insights, and the solution we developed.

Unveiling Museum Challenges

Why people don’t like to go to Museums ?

Our journey commenced with a comprehensive secondary research phase, delving into blog posts, museum’s studies and mainstream press to decipher the challenges haunting museums — sources at the end of this post.

What emerged were multifaceted concerns, ranging from the fear of crowds and even terrorism to the more nuanced struggles of feeling lost in vast spaces or overwhelmed with information. Lack of fun, time, promotion, cultural connection, and financial constraints further added to the labyrinth museums found themselves navigating. To complicate matters, the competition from alternative learning platforms and entertainment services intensified the situation.

A Deep Dive into User Perspectives

Undeterred, we sought primary research insights through interviews and a survey involving 6 and 26 individuals, respectively.

Employing an affinity diagram, we distilled the myriad challenges into a primary persona: Meet Madeleine Fodero, a French junior marketing executive residing in Paris, aged 26.

Madeleine’s frustrations echoed the sentiments of many cultural enthusiasts:

Lack of interaction during museum visits
Static and repetitive exhibitions
Uninformed about relevant events and programs
Desire for a more profound connection with historical and cultural artifacts
Disinterest in exhibits lacking a compelling narrative.

Crafting the User Journey

With Madeleine as our guiding star, we visualized her user journey within a museum, mapping out every touchpoint and emotion.

Given our previous research, we imagined that Madeleine’s typical museum visit begins with excited anticipation but is frequently hindered by extended queues and a sense of disconnect with specific artworks. Our objective is to convert this experience into one that is both captivating and enlightening.

Defining the Problem Statement

Our focus crystallized into a concise problem statement:

How might we help young cultural enthusiasts feel personally engaged with museums’ exhibitions, addressing the lack of relatability, interactivity, and immersion that render museums boring and challenging to understand ?

Ideation Unleashed

The design process propelled us into an ideation phase, where we envisioned an application tailored to offer curated suggestions for exhibitions, museums, and cultural events based on users’ preferences and personal data. The app would double as an immersive audioguide, enriching the museum experience with immersive sounds, dialogues, and explanations — breathing life and context into every artifact.

Furthermore, the app would capitalize on the emergence of LLM generative artificial intelligence to facilitate interaction between visitors and the exhibited pieces, acting as an “AI companion” which would accompany users throughout their museum journey, providing specific information, anecdotes, and engaging conversations. Later, during the High-Fidelity process — as I’ll explain further — I even envisioned it enabling a conversation between the visitor and the creators themselves as we’ve observed generative AI’s ability to embody various personalities.

From Wireframes to Prototypes

Hand Sketches and user flow

We then translated ideas into tangible wireframes, continually refining and combining them into a cohesive user flow aiming to provide our young culture enthusiasts the immersive and interactive experience described hereabove.

After numerous discussions, particularly regarding how users would initiate an interaction with an exhibited piece (such as taking a photo, clicking on it, or using a QR code), we ultimately agreed on the following straightforward user flow (the ideal scenario), taking into account the week nearly going to an end.

We envisioned users utilizing the home page to receive personalized recommendations based on their preferences. They would then select an exhibition of interest and easily initiate a guided tour by clicking a button on the exhibition page. This tour would utilize a map of the venue along with an AI companion located in the lower right corner of the screen, providing insights and guidance. Furthermore, users could click on displayed items to access immersive stories or descriptions, with the option to obtain additional details through transcriptions or written pages, as well as engage in further conversation about the piece with the AI assistant. Additionally, we envisioned a “ticket page” accessible on the navbar to enable users to purchase their tickets directly through an app integration.

Testing and harsh user feedback informed a second version, evolving into a low to middle-fidelity prototype :

Users were confused about receiving personalized suggestions without selecting their preferences, so we added the last page of the onboarding process for users to do so.
Initially, we imagined users selecting specific items to see during their tour using a dropdown list on the exhibition page, but it caused confusion. Due to time constraints, we removed it to streamline the user flow.
The AI assistant appearing in the center of the audioguide page as the storyteller distracted users’ attention, so we relocated it to the right corner alongside the transcript button. We removed the list of items on the page to focus on play/pause buttons and the audio slider.
At this stage, it wasn’t clear if displaying the AI assistant on the navbar was necessary. We decided against it, making it available only during the tour.

Considering this project as a basic undertaking, our assignment was to progress to an early prototype stage in one week. In the end, we presented the following mid-fidelity prototype :

But that’s not the end of my journey !

User flow clarifications

After the bootcamp concluded, I returned to this project alone, intending to clarify certain aspects and give it the stylistic touch it required, as I consider myself more as a UI / Visual designer than a UX designer.

But before proceeding with the High-Fidelity prototype, I needed to ensure that the mid-fidelity version was satisfactory. As I reviewed it with fresh eyes, certain concerns arose :

Why would users have the option to start a visit directly from the exhibition page ?

To do so, they would first need to purchase a ticket, right ? Ideally, they should also be at the beginning of the exhibition path, having passed through ticket control. That’s when I realized I needed to create the “tickets” page we initially envisioned to allow users to register, store and validate their tickets as well as to start their visit path from there.

I also realized that although we had included a like/bookmark feature, we hadn’t created a bookmark page on the navbar. So, that was necessary.

Finally, I realized that even though users would receive suggestions from the home page, they would still need the ability to search for a specific event they’ve heard about or search using keywords. Therefore, a search function also needed to be included.

I’ll discuss the style later on.

So here, you can find the updated user flow, divided into two paths: first, to find relevant exhibitions, and second, the visit path.

You might also notice some layout changes from the mid-fidelity to the High-Fidelity prototype. These changes were necessary to accommodate the new user flow and chosen style, such as adjustments to typography size. And you’ll also notice that I completely removed the navbar during the visit path to enhance immersion.

Adding style

Moodboard challenges

Firstly, I created a moodboard, drawing inspiration from history, particularly the Middle Ages. Indeed, during the one-week challenge, I envisioned the AI companion being personified as a “troubadour” or storyteller from that era.

Our solution took a turn with the introduction of an AI assistant personified as a “troubadour” or storyteller from the Middle Ages. This digital companion would accompany users throughout their museum journey, providing specific information, anecdotes, and engaging conversations taking advantage of the rise of Large Language Models.

However, tests in my surroundings confirmed that it leaned too heavily towards the Middle Ages, neglecting the broader scope of history. Therefore, I created a second version while also attempting to incorporate a “fun” and modern flavor.

But then another problem emerged while trying to translate it into a style tile.

Indeed, the selected typography and drawing style used for the AI troubadour or other AI contacts (such as DaVinci in this example) were too childish, deviating from our primary persona, Madeleine Fodero, aged 26, searching for more immersiveness and interaction instead of pure simple fun.

Therefore I changed my direction for a more subtle approach, aiming to put more emphasis on the overall history and culture vibe. I notably took inspiration from culture websites such as Geo.fr or Connaissance|des|arts. Furthermore, I decided to abandon the concept of personifying the AI as a troubadour and instead opted for a more neutral version of the AI companion feature. However, I retained the idea of personification for specific interactions with exhibited pieces.

I also kept my palette, inspired by medieval troubadour imagery.

You might have also noticed the navbar style. I selected a museum/temple-like icon for the home page and incorporated an animation resembling an unfolding banner, reminiscent of earlier times.

I also decided to deliberately retain certain imperfections here and there, such as the roundness of the back button, to echo the authenticity of traditional pieces of art.

For the High-fidelity prototype below, I used the example of a current exhibition at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris featuring Berthe Morisot, a prominent female figure of the impressionist movement.

High-Fidelity

And here’s the final result after one more week of work :

Conclusion

Next steps

With more time and resources, I would have certainly allocated additional time to thoroughly test each stage of the Mid and High-Fidelity development process, including usability and desirability tests. However, I plan to conduct these tests independently, as I strongly believe in the concept and would love to see this app developed one day.

Additionally, I would have liked to dedicate more time to refining certain screens and adding the search and profile pages, but this is a never-ending process.

Final words

In conclusion, I would like to thank you for taking the time to dive into my work and extend my thanks to my team, particularly for our exceptional collaboration despite the remote nature of our interactions and the fact that we were complete strangers before starting this project.

It is clear that technology, and especially the rise of large language models, has the capacity to transform our engagement with culture and heritage. Museums may just beckon as immersive hubs of exploration and discovery !