Promoting Museum Activities — UX Case Study
A design thinking process from beginning to end
I am just starting to grasp everything that entails being a good UX|UI designer. The first module from Ironhack UX|UI Bootcamp has finished and was mainly focused on UX. The most important thing that I learned during this module is that, although impressively time-consuming (and sometimes frustrating) it might be, a design without research is a terrible idea.
As to apply everything we have learned during this first module, we were tasked to develop wireframes for a very simple app of our own creation that could help to solve a problem related to wellness (don’t be fooled, broad topic = broad problems).
The process followed was the well-known double diamond method for design thinking. The objective was clear: I needed to find a problem (driven by research) and propose a user-centered prototype solution.
Discovering
The starting point was to choose one of the seven areas of wellness, and I decided on Intellectual Wellness (“Wellness that comes from participating in stimulating creative and mental activities and developing knowledge and skills”). I chose this topic not because I think I am very intellectual, but rather because I like to be intellectually challenged and I thought that was the problem that I was going to deal with (spoiler alert: it wasn’t!).
Since for me it was important to have a starting point narrower than intellectual wellness (we only had 5 days for a complete research study + prototypes + classes + a somewhat social life that mainly consisted of going to the supermarket for food), I decided to do some interviews as to understand where should my starting point be before I invested time on surveys (which are much more complex to create and the answers might result inconclusive).
After several interviews inquiring about intellectual curiosity, learning objectives, how to stimulate knowledge after 25, and activities to keep your mind engaged, I understood that people relate intellectual wellness to continuous learning and that continuous learning was associated with Museums visits. These interviews helped me shape some hypothesis that I looked for validation in the next steps:
- People wish to go more to museums → they do not go often.
- People would rather attend museums while on vacation than in their home city → people would rather do other activities than museums in their home city.
The next step was to explore the museum situation more in-depth through a survey. Constructing a survey is not an easy task, but there are tools that help you align the theories you want to prove/ditch to your topic and audience. In this case, I used the lean canvas to define which questions should be in the survey:
After the survey was constructed, it was time to publish it and get some answers. We were advised that getting a sample is not an easy task, so I used every social network known (facebook, google+, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc.) to get enough people to answer ( the assignment asked for 100). The good news is that I got a lot of people answering from groups related to tourism, and when it was time to close the survey, 170 people had participated.
Some of the most relevant answers from the survey were the following:
- 57% had gone to at least 3 museums in 2018 (so right there my first hypothesis debunked — people go to museums).
- 56% go to museums to enrich knowledge.
- Only 11% goes alone to museums (the other 89% will go with partners, friends and/or family)
- Only 21% just visited museums during vacations, the rest of the people would visit museums in the cities they lived at some extent (BOOM! Another hypothesis proved wrong — people do go to museums located in their home city)
- 54% of the sample have never revisited a Museum (Ok, so here I felt that I could pull the thread and find something)
- 37% of people would rather enjoy other activities than going to a museum. ( But… why??? more in-depth analysis was needed)
- 50% have never gone to an activity (exhibition, discussion panel, special event, etc.) planned by museums (I might be able to get something about this…)
- 51% are not subscribed to any museums newsletter (insightful information, probably a SPAM or email overload situation)
So, with all this “right out of the oven” info I was ready to do some follow up questions with another round of interviews. The good thing is that some of the surveyed people left me their contact email and I was able to dig a bit more into their answers (thank you!)
As to move forward, I decided to focus my investigation further, I wanted to:
- Explore a bit more the reason behind why people do not repeat visits to museums.
- Understand why people do not go to activities planned by museums.
I knew I was on the right track when one interviewed answered
“ It is very difficult to track down (museum) activities. The means of diffusion are many and the info is very dispersed and hard to get”
Defining
After two rounds of interviews and a successful turnout of survey participants, I found myself with loads of information that needed to be analyzed. As to organize my ideas, I decided to do an affinity diagram.
Affinity diagrams can help understand the issues and where they are coming from, discover trends and behaviors, and pinpoint the topics for which to base your problem definition. The affinity diagram that I constructed, consisted of a mixture of inputs from both surveys and interviews.
Below a snapshot of how the process of this particular Affinity Diagram went:
The most consistent conclusions that I drove from the affinity diagram were:
- Due to lack of time, people do not look for the offer, schedule or price of these activities. So basically, people do not know what’s going on in museums and they have no time to check — In their defense, I did a benchmarking activity with some museums in Barcelona Spain, and getting activity info seemed like one of those mind games where you have to find a spyglass in a messy desk → complicated.
- People do not want to go alone to museums.
- People do not like museums that are too crowded.
I decided to focus my energy and time on solving only one of the conclusions and leave the other two as “nice to have” features. Thus, I moved forward with the disinformation about museum activities topic because it was the topic most mentioned by and that generated more conversation and discussion by my sample, but I kept the companionship as well as the saturation topics in the back of my mind.
As to further understand my user, I arranged the input that I had into an empathy map. An empathy map is an organizing tool that lays out your user behaviors. The objective is to transfer all the knowledge acquired during the research about your user into what he/she says, feel, think and does as well as defines the pain points and their goals into this “map.”
After the empathy map is completed, the Persona is created. Basically, the Persona is the face of your empathy map and it should be your go-to reference during the creation process. Keeping the Persona in your head will keep under control that the design you are creating is user-centered and not you-centered. Moreover, after all that research, the Persona is already formed in your head, it just takes a bit of imagination put it on paper.
So, after Sofia, I needed to define the problem. Probably because I have been submerged in this topic for a while, but the problem was clear for me:
Or, if you prefer a problem from the user perspective:
Developing and Prototyping
Having a problem (and Sofia) gave me a direction to a solution: An app was needed that alleviated the difficulties that people have to find museum activities and (most important) to get them to go.
So, I went into sketch mode and with the design studio method, I came with a lot of ideas. The downside, some of these ideas were too far away from the problem, I struggled to keep the “creative flow” focused on the topic so it took me a bit more time than expected.
After I was happy with the main content of my app, I moved forward to making a paper prototype (and its iterations):
Although I had in mind a very simple app, the users that were involved during the testings guided me throughout the changes that need to be done and were very vocal in what they liked and didn’t.
Below you can see the third and last prototype were some iterations can be observed:
- There is a welcome and set up screen
- A more complete home screen+ event card
- Search engine tailored to the app characteristics
- Home and back buttons in every screen
In total, there were 4 iterations, and through these evolutions, I was able to construct a better app by having Sofia in mind and listening to the user.
In the example below you can observe some of the iterations suffered by the home screen:
- During the user testings, people were having difficulties understanding that the app was related to museums, so I had to insert the museum wording in it, and during the last iterations, the museum wording disappeared because there was a login screen that helped the user understand the app.
- There used to be a feature for “crowd control”( the d in the bottom of the first screen) but after some user testing in the first round it seemed like something that people might not use and Sofia neither( besides, it was one of those “nice to have”features” in the definition phase).
- The bookmark logo had to change from an actual bookmark to a star as for people to better understand it.
- The wording of some phrases evolved as to a more catered and easier to understand lexicon.
- And, finally, the history of attended activities was added because it seemed like something that people (and Sofia) might use as to refresh their memory.
Moreover, in the last round of iteration, the “buddy” concept was further developed to achieve Sofia’s goal to have someone to go with to the Museums.
Besides, during every iteration, I intended for the complete user journey to be fast and simple, so Sofia wouldn’t have to spend too much time on it. Making the information easy to access and at hand was another important characteristic that drove most of my decisions. While making iterations, I would imagine that Sofia will be using this app during the 5-min coffee breaks while she is planning for the evening.
I would have wished to move forward with this particular project, the feedback that I got from some colleagues is that they might use it. The next step would have been to develop the UI ( and another round of iterations) which is uncharted territory for me as of today, but, who knows, maybe I would continue developing this particular project in the future.
Below you can find the “Museum Activity Goers” App — low fidelity online prototype:
Please take into account that this is my first ever design, so there is much to be improved!
The Big Challenge
Maybe you are thinking that my biggest challenge might have been to either get people to answer the surveys, or to develop a persona, or even to construct a prototype; in my case, it was to pull the string from research and find that specific problem that my sample (+180 people between surveys and interviews) needed to be solved. It took a lot of effort to understand what people really needed, patience to keep going, and perseverance to get to the bottom of the problem (not to mention that I needed to keep the ego under control and don’t impose my own ideas).
Key Learnings
- Although surveys open the door for the information, the interviews are the ones that can give you more insights. The surveys have several limitations, and one of those limitations is that it is very hard to understand the “why” of most of the answers, this insight is much more accessible during interviews.
- Being flexible during research is important as to properly absorb all the info that you are receiving. Iteration belongs every step of the process, so an open mind is always needed to grasp what your research is telling you.
- Keep the Problem and Persona close by during your creation, construction, and iteration phases, by doing this you stay in focus regarding the purpose of the tool you are building.
- Be careful with user testings of your prototype. Different profiles will give you different insights and is up to you. You are the one that understands your user and knows what problem you are alleviating.
The next module is just begging and I can only guess what’s in store, it will definitely be a challenge to my intellectual wellness ;).
As always, feel free to comment/react/feedback your input is appreciated and welcomed.
