Project 1 : Do we need to design in a Metaverse to bring people closer to museums?
IRON HACK UX/UI design BootCamp: Case study n°1
Project overview
The first-week sprint project and presentation are done!
It happen a few days ago with my 4 teammates. We had to follow the Design Thinking process — consisting of 5 steps Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test — to answer our fictitious client problem:
“How Might We help museums and other public institutions in crisis since 70’s bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?”
The goal of this full remote one-week course was to deliver a paper LOFI prototype according to user research we found.
So, did we design an incredible mobile app from our very own dream, our very own assumption in order to fulfill one metaverse like Decentraland with exhibitions to solve the french museum crisis?
We could, but we didn’t.
Why? The people we interviewed have a common pain: they can’t enjoy museum events with their loved ones because of ticket prices.
So, our simple solution was to aggregate all discounts and free tickets from French museums on a mobile app. When he logs in, thanks to filter selection, the user can discover the newest, the best-rated exhibition, or recommended ones according to his previous visits around him. The user can share the exhibition with his friends, buy tickets and find the QR code ticket quickly when he arrived at the museum. Below, you will find more details about it.
NB : The goal of this first IRON HACK project presentation was to speak for non-designers rather than clients, stakeholders or co-workers. So, I decided to do the same in this case study by following and explaining a bit of each Design thinking steps for my relatives.
Empathize
The first step was to learn to ensure we were solving a problem that actually exists in people’s lives. Without research, we could make decisions for ourselves instead of for users.
We started by writing our own assumptions about people who don’t go to the museum in a Lean survey canvas to brainstorm the further quantitative and qualitative data we would like to collect.
We did some secondary research and we were surprised to learn that there was no crisis museum at all in France, it was quite the opposite: visitor frequency grows years after years (Covid years was the only decrease ones). So, we decide to dive our research to find precisely who don’t go to museums and above all: exactly why they don’t?
User research: summary
Thanks to the quantitative survey we learned that :
- 57% get informed through social media.
- 45.8% would not go to a museum because of the price.
- 42 % are students and intermediate occupation.
Then we conducted 5 interviews to understand the users we’ll design for and their needs. Interviewees told us :
- “I went because the first Sunday of the month is free”
- “It’s not really obvious to book a ticket; I don’t really know how to find the lowest prices”
- “Prices can be too high”
- “I would like a website where you can see all the exhibitions.”
- “I would like an application that would suggest exhibitions to me according to my previous choices.”
What we learned
This user group confirmed the assumption that the french museum isn’t in a profound crisis: interviewed love to go to museums whatever to learn as art passionate or to be entertained to they meet up their relatives.
However, we discovered that :
- Visitors get informed by advertising and from relatives’ advice to discover new museum exhibitions. However, they don’t know how to quickly find them on their own.
- Visitors go to the museum for day free entrance but they don’t know when they happen, they have to check on each museum website.
Define
After to collected data, we clustered them to select findings in order to define a clear user point of view.
Nurture by our research, we built an “infinity wall project ”on Figjam and created an Affinity diagram to cluster our research findings and to see trends and relationships in data.
Red sticky notes were used for the negative findings, blue ones for the positive, yellow ones for the neutral, and green ones for the quantitative findings. Lastly, we did a team vote to select the most actionable information and design opportunities.
Secondly, we did an empathy map to put ourselves in the shoes of users. We categorized users’ testimonials into attitudinal then we synthesized rational and sentimental aspects of our users through their situations, acts, feelings and emotions.
We defined 3 insights from these findings :
- Insight 1 : Users need to go to museums when entrance is free.
- Insight 2 : Users need an effortless way to find new and trendy museum exhibitions.
- Insight 3 : Users need a way to avoid queuing
Persona
Personas are one of the most important parts of the Design Thinking process. We’re not here to disrupt a specific market but to remove user pains, in order to do that, defining who we’ll be designing for was fundamental.
From all these actionable findings and clear insights, we defined “Melissa the almost graduated” Persona to :
- build consensus and commitment to the design direction,
- be sure that everyone in our team had the same understanding of the user,
- keep the design centered on Melissa at every step of the process as well.
Users journey and storyboard
The user journey is a core UX tool to understand at a glance the high-level user experience and to focus on areas a team should work on.
So, mapping Melissa's user journey revealed how helpful it would be for users to find by themselves free tickets exhibition.
Then one of my teammates, Maria, draw this amazing storyboard from the user journey. Another and complementary step into Melissa's journey going to a museum!
Problem statement
What could happen if we improved Melissa's museum journey without defining one crystal clear problem? We’ll waste our time by brainstorming about dozen of solutions that go all over the place, distorted by our own perception. Even worse, we’ll waste our time arguing that a solution from one team member could be better than the solution from another one without any tangible facts. That’s why writing one problem statement is a core step in the Design Thinking process. Everyone in our team wrote a problem statement, then we speak about it and we mixed the ideas in order to define the most accurate one :
“Melissa, an almost graduate student, needs to have access to affordable museum tickets, because she and her friends are interested in discovering arts in museums with a limited budget.”
Problem hypothesis
“We believe using a platform that is connected to different museum booking systems, will achieve the user finding tickets with the best price for his or her situation. We will know we are wrong if museums visit frequency doesn’t increase more than 10% during the post app first year launch.”
Ideate
We defined clear ideas of who our users will be, then we used some tools to generate ideas about our product that would help users to accomplish their goals.
This step was the most interesting for me. I’ve never led a Crazy 8 within a team and further remotely, through Figjam and Zoom! We use this brainstorming tool because we already decided to design a mobile app that will aggregate discounts and free entrances museum exhibitions.
Connected on Zoom, everyone took pen and paper to draw in 8 minutes 8 ideas about the app feature and frames. 1 minute per idea without breaks is a fun and powerful method to avoid overthinking and to go straight to the point. Then, each of us uploads his paper on our Figjam file. I suggested writing the list of our crazy idea feature on the Figjam, under each paper pics in order to increase their readability.
Next, each of us voted for the ideas that best address the user’s problem.
Then we cut and remove the ideas with no vote on them to cluster the ones with.
Paper LOW-FI
Concept drawings can be used to explore more technical aspects of a design, providing an initial response and possible solutions to problems before putting resources into a process of creation.
Thanks to the Crazy 8 tool, we have been able to find and validate enough features and frames to sketch “Melissa happy path” mobile app frames: from opening the app, discovering new exhibitions, to show the QR code free ticket at the museum entrance.
Screen 1: Melissa open the app, scroll down to watch some discount, free and personal recommendation exhibitions, and then tap on the “offer” bottom navbar.
Screen 2 and 3: She taps on one free exhibition to learn more about it and to invite her friends.
Screen 4, 5, 6 : She selects two of her friends who also use the application. She books and buys the exhibition.
Screen 7 : She received a ticket purchase confirmation.
Screen 8 and 9 : four days later, queuing a front of the museum with her friends, Melissa opens the app and shows the QR code at the counter entrance.
You can test the paper Low fi prototype v1 here.
Usability testing
Solving user problems is delightful but we needed to confirm we were on the right track before investing in more resources to continue to build our idea. That’s why testing our concept to get feedbacks early was crucial to perfect it.
We tested our design assumption through concept testing to remove our own biases in order to improve the first version of our Paper LOW-FI.
Thanks to the 5 interviewees We found that :
- Users want a cleaner way to navigate the app.
- Users want to understand the main home page purpose right away.
- Users want a more logical way to interact with the filter.
- Users want the “current ticket” area to stand out more compared to the “past event” tickets.
Before and after usability testing
We removed the bottom nav bar which confuse testers at this step of the design. We’ll put it back later in the MID-FI step.
We added a filter button on the home page and added a new screen with a bottom sheet filter to improve user choices.
We keep the “current ticket” design but modified the “Past events” one from a full picture to a simple text to tap.
You can test the paper Low fi prototype V2 here.
Conclusion
We learned from our research that people do like to go to museums, there’s no big crisis in France. When people don’t go over there, it’s due to the entrance fee or complicated ways to access information. We believed our solution will solve both by providing all free museum french offers in one handy place.
We learned how crucial it is to properly define the user problem to create an accurate prototype and also the importance of testing to understand unmet needs.
I already learned the Design Think process thanks to the Google UX design certificate but it was alone, and this first UX Design’s Iron Hack project was a great opportunity for me to practice it within a team!
So, we don’t disrupt the entertainment market with an expensive and infeasible Metaverse experience or a Netflix killer app to bring people closer to museums. We need to learn who people are, what their pain points are, and to design a handy solution to help them during their journey.
PS : I apologize for the click bait title, my goal was to open a topic about the most important UX Design lesson I learned so far: we should solve user problems with whom we empathize and nothing else… What do you think about ? 🧸 💵
