Case Study: Arts Council England

6 min readOct 23, 2016

LONDON IS FAILING AS THE GLOBAL CENTRE OF ARTS & CULTURE

Between 2015 and 2018, Arts Council England will invest £1.1 billion of public money from the government and an estimated £700 million from the National Lottery to help create art and culture experiences for everyone.

The Brief/Challenge

Our challenge was to promote future engagement by both residents and visitors from around the globe. We hope to find a digital solution that will boost participation, learning, and recognition for London as a world capital for arts and culture.

The Approach

The analysis of the current market was central in the process I have undertaken. It was important to capture what was going on in London right now and find any opportunities that could be exploited. I gain a good understanding of London’s current experience for residents and visitors. Here are some of the key things I found.

London has the lowest engagement rate for Art’s and Culture in the Uk.

This result was quite shocking, given London’s size, wealth and diversity we would not imagine it to score below the national average for engagement. There is an obvious problem here that needs addressing; my next step was to see who else may have found a solution.

Competitive Analysis

Who are our competitors and what are they currently doing to help engage users?

Key Insights

From our competitive analysis, we found that the MoMA had one of the most engaging applications for users who wanted to connect with the arts in new york city. Not only was their app fun it engaged the user in learning about each exhibition and provided incentives for the users to come back to the Moma in the form of discounts for using the app. We managed to learn a lot from this and moved on to see what our actual users would think.

We conducted customer and market research to drive our discovery phase using a number of different techniques:

Interviews
Field Research
Surveys

From our survey, we contacted some people to have an our “one to one” interview.

We came to the conclusion people “like to learn and engage with art in a fun way”

“I enjoyed it because they gave us a path through the exhibition to follow, and thanks to that I felt more engaged!”

User Personas

Paola is 25, She is an artist and lives in London.

Goal

Her goal is to find an interesting event and learn more about art.

Frustration

She gets board when she looks for events.

Chris is 25 years old and he lives in Bristol. He comes often to London as a tourist to visit his friends.

Goal

He wants to make the most of his stay in London

Frustration

He doesn’t know where to go to find engaging art event.

Once we defined our personas the next step was to identify their main problems so, we used an experience and affinity map.

Affinity Map

These are the key insights that defined the final version of the product:

Discover more and increase their knowledge about art and culture
They want an enjoyable experience
They need a reliable guidance

Sketch time !

Once I got a better understanding of what I wanted to do and the issues I should tackle, I took some time to sketch layouts and try different design approaches. I like to draw low fidelity layouts as they help me determine very quickly what works and what doesn’t. I can iterate easily. It also allows me to see the different versions I’ve worked on and in what direction I’m going. Sketches are also a good way to gather feedback before jumping ahead to detailed wireframes.

So we started with the delivery stage In this stage we were testing out app with our perspective users and seeing how they would not respond with our first paper prototype and it was a really excited stage because we had a lot of assumptions and with those came a lot of different ideas and we’re just trying to test out these ideas and see if a prospective users were going to take the actions that we wanted them to take on the actions that we assume them to take.

Is with our perspective users to see if they follow this assumed path and a lot of times they didn’t and from these actions we actually were able to make something key iterations to the design.

We made seven different iterations and user tests, and from those users a test came out a lot of various solutions that was key to the usability of an application and key to our user’s call process.