National Gallery of Denmark
How might we combine the practical and the profound in one digital solution?
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Art can be profound. It can be enlightening. And for some, a life-changing experience. However, getting to the art gallery can be a journey filled with challenges. In a busy life, it might require a lot of planning.
SMK — The National Gallery of Denmark has a vision of the art experience to go beyond the physical confines of the gallery and into the digital sphere. At the same time, they also want to reach new target groups. They did not feel that their current website could fulfill that vision
When SMK asked my team at 1508 and me to design their new website, we wanted to address both the practical and profound:
- Research a variety of target groups and find out what challenges they experienced when planning a trip to the museum
- Explore how we could connect the digital experience of art with the physical art gallery
Practical
How can we get an understanding of the challenges that keep people from a visit to the museum?
To get an understanding of what matters to people before an actual visit to an art gallery. We tested a host of challenges, desires, and needs with a wide variety of people to find solutions that might help them with their key challenges. Instead of answering tedious requirements and specifications or impress with enticing examples of how key page types might come to look, we investigated into a narrow user scenario:
How might we help parents plan a visit with children?
We used Value Proposition Canvas combined with a Customer Journey to map our insights and from there we started formulating hypotheses.
Prototyping with the team at SMK
Together with the team at SMK we began to investigate how we might design solutions for our specific hypothesis, so we could test it with our target group. We did so through intense one-day-design-sprints, which started with a mapping session and ended with a storyboard session, mapping out a potential solution:
Profound
How can we connect the digital and physical experience?
One thing is designing the practical aspect and making sense of information. But how might we bring the art experience to the website as well? Art can be experienced everywhere. Art at a gallery has the unique potential to obtain full attention to the art object and exclude everything else.
The visual experience of the website found inspiration in the frame, as a metaphor for the exclusive focus. The frame gives different pieces of content full focus and calls upon us to exclude everything else. And correspondingly, the absence of the frame widens the perspective and brings us back into the more practical realm.
Results
After the launch of the website the museum has seen an increase of visitors with around 15% and significant increases in online sales of tickets and yearly passes.
The project also resulted in a prolonged collaboration with the museum on their visionary project SMK Open — an immersive digital catalogue making the entire art collection of SMK accessible online. You are now able to search through more than 40,000 different pieces of art and explore them in detail. It is possible to filter colors, artists, or subjects along with a number of other choices. The solution was done by leveraging SMK’s own public API, and by adding Machine Learning, so that artworks can now be experienced, studied and utilized on different levels in your own time and place.
Finally, the website won a silver Creative Circle Award
Roles
- Strategy and UX lead
- Field studies and interviews with stakeholders and users
- Sprint facilitation
- Value Proposition and Journey mapping
- Website data analysis and diagnosis
- Strategy and UX tactics
- Wireframing and prototyping
- Usability, task and user testing
- Heatmap and dropout analysis
- Documentation and reporting
