Wicked Problem: Connecting Modern People to Culture & Heritage
A case study on a prototype to solve cultural and heritage problems
For our first project in the IronHack BootCamp, Abiola, Alina, and I were tasked with solving the wicked problem of: “How might we help museums and other public institutions fulfil their mission of preserving cultural heritage while making it more accessible to a wider audience?”. Our goal was to deliver a mid-fidelity solution that addresses this question within a week.
Secondary research & user research
As you can imagine, culture and heritage is a pretty broad scope. How can we just solve a problem as grand as that? We needed to narrow our focus, so we zoomed in on museums. During our secondary research, we stumbled upon this gem of a quote that sums up modern museum visits:
“Many persons visit the Museum as students in search of special information, but the majority come for pleasure or recreation or simply to satisfy a natural curiosity.”
- The Functions of the Modern Museum*, George Byron Gordon
We conducted user-centered design interviews to identify factors that attract or deter people from visiting museums, with three hypotheses formulated to guide our interviews:
- Having a more interactive experience will keep visitors attention and lead to more visitation.
- Increasing language accessibility will allow more people to attend museums.
- Personalization of experience will attract more visitors and enhance their desire to return.
Interestingly, language was not the biggest barrier, the interviewees are still able to enjoy the art without understanding fully the language; instead, the museum content often felt too high-level. Interviewees expressed a desire for a more interactive and personalized experience.
We concluded from our findings that the above four main aspects can be interesting to explore and we then decided to narrow the focus down to interactive content and guided tours.
User persona
Once we gather the research insights, we sat down and started to construct a user persona that could encapsulate the findings we had. Thus, Hannah Miller the art enthusiast was born!
Hannah is a young marketing manager who visits museums to spark inspiration for her art projects. She loves learning about art and history but sometimes struggles to grasp the full story behind art pieces.
Problem statement
With our user persona in mind, creating the problem statement wasn’t as difficult as we thought from the start of our project.
We first used the problem statement method to summarise what we think can be a key problem for Hannah to help us further on our project. Our first problem statement draft was too wide-scoped, so we returned to the drawing board and tried to use the problem tree method to narrow down our problem statement. With the additional method and the help from our teacher Max, we were able to create a problem statement that we were confident with creating a solution for. Our final problem statement is:
Young art enthusiasts need to find a way to interact with art pieces in museum in order to get inspiration because exhibits don’t always provide enough information on the art pieces.
Ideation and prioritisation
Now that we have a clear problem statement, we were excited to start brainstorming ideas to address the challenge at hand. We used the Crazy 8s as an ideation tool to generate as many ideas as possible in two rounds.
From these two rounds of ideation, we were able to generate ideas that we never thought we would come up with, such as an art event-based product where users can gather with other art enthusiasts in a museum and a game-based checklist that people can go around the museum to find the art pieces.
Since we generated so many good ideas, we decided to use the MoSCoW method to prioritise our solutions. We realised then that we were prioritising according to what we wanted instead of what would be the most useful for our users.
So we changed gears and used the Impact/Effort Matrix as well to help clarify our solution prioritisations. Two solutions stood out the most: An app that allows users to have conversations with artists’ AI-generated modal and an interactive game app that users can look for the art and its info in the museum through finding the artwork with a snippet shown on the app.
We chose the first solution, as it aligned better with our target users (young art enthusiasts) and differentiated itself from traditional method of showcasing art information.
User flow
With the solution selected, we immediately went into creating a user flow to demonstrate how the product can be used. We went with a flow that the user will take to conversate with the artist's AI-generated modal and find out more information about the art piece that the artist created.
Using pen and paper (or iPad), we then sketched out how we think the flow should look like. After a few internal iterations, we created our Low-Fi design:
As shown in our Low-Fi design, the idea was to allow users to either scan a QR code displayed in front of an art piece or select the art piece they are interested in through a provided list, then directly start a conversation with the artist’s AI-generated modal based on the art piece they choose through three different methods (write a question, record a question or selected one of the predefined questions), and lastly, if they want to learn more about the art piece without the conversation, they can learn more with a detailed article about the specific art piece.
We want users to be able to understand the art piece they see, in which when they conversate with the artist AI, they can ask their own questions and have the artist AI answer them according to already existing data, creating a fun, personalised and interactive experience for the users.
Prototyping and testing — The artist AI conversation app
Once the Low-Fi design was done, we went ahead and created our Mid-Fi prototype with interactive components. We utilised the new methods we learnt through the first week of BootCamp, such as interlinking the different screens, creating an overlay for pop-ups and scrolling animation.
We also conducted user and usability testing to see if the proposed solution was working for our users.
The mixed testing uses a very similar method to the user research interview. We first defined the testing goal as to find out if users can get information from art pieces more directly and have a feeling of deeper connection to the artist/art piece through our app.
We had a few rounds of testing sessions with different users and were able to get valuable insights. The three key points were:
- Users find the app engaging and refreshing to see the artist’s AI modal bring art to life
- Users agree that the app allows them to get information directly
- Users find the interface sometimes confusing and aren’t sure what the buttons or video mean
With the testing sessions still fresh in our minds, we immediately put in work on applying the feedback to our solution.
We updated the solution accordingly. We added more detailed descriptions of the video placeholders so that it is clear for users what the placeholders are for. We also added subtitles within the video placeholders to allow users to read the conversation as well. Then, we adapted the description text under the buttons to be more detailed, and added an action guideline above the buttons to indicate what users can do.
Check out and interact the finalised Mid-Fi prototype below:
Next steps and key takeaways
Now, where do we go from here?
To conclude the first group project we had with IronHack, our team summarised two points for any future development (because who knows, maybe this is the next big idea!) and two key learning points we got from the project.
- While testing the solution, one of our users mentioned that it could be cool to have a sharing feature on not only the article, but also for the interaction with the AI model. Who doesn’t want to see a Vincent van Gough AI answering modern questions about his art in real-time? Therefore we proposed there should be a future option to share the interaction between artists’ AI and users.
- We noticed that most of the users didn’t acknowledge the “Search for art” button during the testing session. We theorised that perhaps this button served more as a distraction than help, but would need more testing to get to the bottom of this. Thus, a possible development would be to just remove the “Search for art” button.
- From the beginning of the project, our teacher Max has always said “your first idea is not your best idea”. We cannot agree more with him after this week. The project solution was not only decided on many different ideation rounds, but the finalised version was also create only after many rounds of iterations with testings and feedbacks. The power of iteration is not to be taken lightly!
- While the problem statement was a great guiding light, we have to give credit to our user persona Hannah Miller the art enthusiast in helping us define the problem and find the solution. Summarising and humanising the different key findings we found with Hannah has been very helpful for us, as we the problems more realistically.
All in all, our team really enjoyed the whole progress of the design thinking project. From researching to seeing the solution come to life, it was a fascinating feeling and experience. Even though it was just the first week, I can already say that I am hooked and can’t wait continue my UX/UI journey further.
Curious to learn more about our project? Check out my awesome team members’ case studies as well:
Alina Chis: https://medium.com/@alinachis93
Abiola Kalejaiye: https://medium.com/@biola1985kal
