Enjoy your visit at the Great Gallery of evolution with a new way
As we know each museum in unique with different aspects and exhibition. My team and I choose the Natural History Museum of Paris for our experience. Why? Because this museum houses the Great Gallery of Evolution where you can meet 7000 thousand species from ocean and to the air. The goal of the museum, sensitize people about our biodiversity and the impact of the man on it.
The challenges
- Identifying the key issue of the users’ visitors
- Creating and designing an application from scratch
The solution
Visit the museum with your family with an interactive game with an application. Very few museums offer interactive games to help children discover the pieces they own and allow them to learn while having fun.
Empathize
I didn’t include every parts of my research just a summary of my team discovery.
User Interviews
Before we dive in, we have to know about the user experience at the gallery, my team and I interviewed visitors for 3 hours, 8 users were nice to answer our questions, they all came from different background, ages…
Here are some questions:
- Why did you come to the Grand Gallery today?
- How long was your visit today? Do you plan to return to the Gallery?
- Did you need help to find your way around? Why?
- Did you use interactive terminals?
- What particularly interested you during your visit?
- Conversely, what was less interesting?
Insights
→People with children under six can’t entertain their children. Firstly, one part reserved for them is only open for two hours a day, children can’t access some interactive terminal. Secondly, most of animals in the gallery are untouchable for them and finally parents can’t pass on biodiversity’s importance with complicated terms so they get frustrated.
→Other people dislike the need of change and like to wander around.
→Interesting to know they all loved the place with its architecture, magnificent scenography, the changes of lights and sounds to make discover this institution.
Opportunities
→Our application help users with kids to play and interact with all species in the museum and parents can teach them all information on them.
With all insights we used an empathy map to better understand the user.
Synthesize
Persona
A persona is the characterization of a user who represents a segment of your target audience. With the empathy map, we extract one persona likely to use our app.
Meet Marie
To better understand the user to achieve their goal, we created a persona who will use the feature of our app. -pic persona-
Marie, 35 years old, dynamic mother who enjoys spending time with her children Léon and Anna.
Define
User Journey
In order to determine the problem and the solution, we had to imagine a typical day in the museum for a user. For Marie, the visit lasted a maximum of one hour, she would guide her children and pass on the knowledge of the museum. Let’s not forget that the children should have fun throughout the hour .
Problem statement
We have observed that the current visit for families is not providing enough interactivity, causing younger kids to grow tired of the visit quickly, as well as lacking pedagogical material, which generates some frustration for parents who wish they could explain more things to their children.
For Marie, a young mother with 2 kids aged 6 and 4, how could we make the visit at La Grande Galerie de l’Evolution more pedagogical and interactive so she can enjoy the moment with them and be able to pass on more knowledge ?”
Prototype
Crazy 8, it is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. My team and I did it three times so we had twenty-four ideas, the second time and three times we narrowed down our ideas and did a dot voting pick the idea .
By reducing our ideas we were able to choose Mary’s path. This path is to choose an animal, go towards it, get information and interact with it and then start the process again.
User Flow
Here the user flow, a simple flow to move forward in the museum.
Low fi prototype
After coming up with our ideas, we designed a prototype of low fidelity to get an idea of Mary’s journey. Moving forward we had to modify or redo wireframes for more fluidity like a game.
Test
Usability testing
5 users were nice to test our low fi prototype, they were all women from teenager to mother. We explained to them that they had the role of Marie, mother coming with her 2 children and they had to imagine having the game application to start the visit (and the game with the children).
During the test we recorded their frustrations and feelings about and after we did a debrief with them about the experience of the test. All the testers liked the idea of an interactive game the instructions were clear and so was the application. But problems were identified with classification, activities and guidance.
Some “Selfie” activities do not teach the child, but are no longer fun, and the map does not guide users to the next animal.
Prototype upgrade
We have removed some screens and re-done second versions of some. Indeed, we have taken into account the educational part for the activities and orientation in the museum with a map allowing to know its location thanks to a geolocation system.
Learnings from the experience
- Share ideas with a team is great because as a team we can decide on ideas and keep the most important ones.
- The typical user, we met different people from different backgrounds, but one of them made an impression on us.
What’s next?
If I continue the project, I think we will have to re-test the prototype with the updates made and then turn the prototype into mid-fi and high-fi. Develop the app and test it inside the museum.
My last medium post “Improving La Poste”