A digital journey through the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

UX Case Study — 1 week

5 min readJan 18, 2020

Musée d’art Moderne is the museum of modern art in Paris. It is a museum of Parisian art dedicated to twentieth-century art. It is located at number 11 of the Avenue du Président Wilson, in the XVI District of Paris, just next to the Eiffel Tower.

My team and I were (@yasmina and @lisa) was mandated to go to the museum MAM (Musée d’Art Modern de Paris), to identify and understand the main problem that visitors could possibly be facing when visiting it.

Our goal was to propose, prototype and test a solution to this problem.

We started with our interview questions, starting from more general questions to deeper ones according to the answer we were given. For this we had to make some assumptions to have a starting point.
We classified our questions into different themes, and these were some of the questions:
General questions
- Where are you from? (Tourist or local)
- Why did you pick this museum?
- Why did you come today to the museum?

Preparation of the visit
- How did you prepare yourself for your visit today?
- How did you get the info you needed to come today?
- How did you buy your tickets? Can you tell us your journey

Cultural services
- Did you use any of the services that the MAM offers (audio guide, tours, app..)?
- If yes, why?

Facilities
- Did you use any facilities?
- Did you need assistance? Why?

Empathise

Research and results:

We realised there were 5 main themes that kept coming out:

- Space and physical matters
- Online info / practical aspects
- Exhibition content info
- Experience during and after the visit
We realised that the two last points were kind of similar so we decided to focus on those themes to find the key pain point.

Now let me now introduce you to Olivier, “the cultural wanderer”. He is a young man living in Paris, and he likes to go to the MAM regularly to see the temporary exhibitions, he likes to be up to date about modern art. Olivier isn’t a pro about modern art but it is one of his hobbies and he really likes talking about his visits to friends and relatives. The issue is, that he doesn’t always feel like he is enriched enough from his visits.

Define

Through the journey map of Olivier when he visits a temporary exhibition at MAM, you will see his emotions throughout the journey (starting when he enters the temporary exhibition and finishing when he leaves the museum).

As you can see he doesn’t feel always as happy as he would like to. The moments where he isn’t feeling at his “tope’st” is when he sees an artwork that catches his attention and can’t find any information apart from the title and year of creation. This led us to our problem statement:

How might we improve the way regular visitors, like Olivier, feel more enriched after temporary exhibitions?

The visitors will then share their experience more often. This will increase the number of regular visitors and the good reviews on social networks and golden books of the MAM.

Ideate

Now that we had our problem statement we had to ideate a solution. We used crazy 8 and storyboards techniques to open the range of possibilities for his.

Many solutions came out of this such as:
- Doing an quiz throughout the visit
- 3d glasses, virtual reality
- experiencing the journey with the 5 senses
- workshops, quiz…
- adding feature to the existent app

With a focus on the temporary exhibitions, we propose to improve the existing app by adding 2 news features:
- access to all information available during the visit to live a complete experience and pursue the visit even after leaving the museum
- save in “Favorites” preferred artwork to keep a souvenir and have direct access

We did the user flow Olivier would do throughout his visit at the temporary exhibition using the solution suggested. This way we could see clearly what his ideal journey would look like, and every step he had to go through to have a great experience.

Prototype

Thanks to our user flow we could work on our low wireframe prototype.

The task was to enter a specific temporary exhibition, find the artwork that Olivier was attracted to, read the extra info provided, save it in his favourites, go back to the “virtual exhibition” and end his visit, with his printed personalised leaflet.

Test

We prepared our testing scenario and went back to the MAM to test our prototype with users alike Olivier. We tested it with 5 users we got feedback such as:

Positive points:
- clear scenario
- relevancy of the solution
- fluid and smooth navigation

Need Improvements

Screen 1 (left side)
- Picking the 2 options should be possible
- “Quitter” button useless
- “Favoris” sum up useless

Screen 2 (righ side)
- Stressful : “Will I be able to print my fav if I exit now?”

Learnings

- Remain very graphically simple on low fi prototypes → can distort reality and create confusion.
- Visitors were less suspicious than during our first interviews (playful aspect)