Case study: mobile app to maintain visitors’ interest in museums.
Wicked problem: team project, design thinking method.
As a team of 5 people we were asked to solve a wicked problem. Our subject is about Culture and Heritage. On this article, you will discover the method we used, the design thinking to go through this first challenge of the UX UI Design bootcamp at Iron Hack !
— THE BRIEF
Since the 70s, museums and other public institutions have been suffering a profound crisis. In the heart of this kind of institution, there’s the mission of making heritage accessible for all. They build the bridges between objects and people, for them to be enjoyed by citizens.
We tried to find out, How Might We help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?
1. EMPATHISE
— QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
We began by a quantitative research, a survey to measure aspects of the users and user behavior and get statistical results. In order to do that we worked on the Lean Survey Canvas to determine the questions we would ask to the users. This is a team tool which helped us generating surveys faster.
Then we made a short online survey thanks to google form. We asked about 10 questions (demographic, habits in the museums, budget and experiences during the pandemic) with checkboxes and open — endend questions.
From the Lean survey canvas we learned that the museums already started digital visits during the pandemic in the world and it helped us to find this question: “What would you like to see from museums during this pandemic ?”.
We try to understand our target, the motivations and the pain points regarding to the museums. We got 113 answers from men and women users, and here are the following main insights:
113 people (who lost their time…) answered the survey with following results:
50% women / 50% men.
66% of the users are between 25 and 34 years old.
87% are frustrated about the crowds in the museums.
55% of the users go to a museum between 1 to 3 times per year.
69% of the users spend less than 25€ per month.
— QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: USERS INTERVIEWS
After, we conducted 5 user interviews to get qualitative data. We did a one to one interview remotely, recording the users so we were able to observe and analyze their reactions, gestures, and feelings. It was about 30 minutes per interview depending the users. To ask them questions, we prepared a template thanks to the results we found with the quantitative data we could went further about the motivations, the pains, and anecdotes.
“What kind of museum do you prefer” “Why do you go to this kind of museums ? ” “ How does it make you feel to go there” ecc.
We always try to go deeper and ask our users “WHY?” in order to get more specific data.
The main quotes we recorded are the following:
“I’m interested by everything, all styles of museums. I don’t have preferences as long as I get to learn” — Lorène, 28 y.o.
“The crowd! The lines really spoil the fun” — Liliane, 58 y.o.
“ I visit museums alone, I’ve never find a wingman to go with (lmfao)” — Mathilde, 25 y.o.
“Museum or exhibition are a way to escape” — Hugo, 29 y.o.
“For something very unique, I could afford to pay expensive price!” — Vincent, 30 y.o.
At this point, we had a lot of data from the quantitative and qualitative research, but then we wanted to categorize it by affinity.
— AFFINITY DIAGRAM
With this great qualitative and quantitative data, we decided to use the affinity diagram tool. This is useful to organise our research insights by categories to define the users point of view. Some patterns appeared with the same answers told several times. We grouped those similar points together on the affinity diagram in different categories.
We discovered that the users are frustrated about the crowds in museums. We learned that users go to the museum between 1–3 times per year.
Our main target are between 25 to 34 years old.
Users need to keep a link with culture especially during the pandemic.
— EMPATHY MAP
We learned a lot about the users from the interviews but we wanted to empathize more, so for that reason we used the Empathy map tool. It helped us to get into our user’s mind, and to understand what they feel and their emotions about their experiences with museums.
- GAINS POINTS
We learned here that the motivations of the users are a passion and curiosity about culture, and discover new things. They feel that its fun it’s a way to escape.
- PAIN POINTS
But despite those great feelings, they are really annoyed by the huge queues and they don’t like to waste their time, also the distance and the price appeared as a frustration.
— USER PERSONA
At this step we were really glad to have all those precious informations. We could finally define our primary user persona, Emily Adams, the history lover.
A user persona is a fictional character created from the behaviors and motivations of the users who answered the survey, and the 5 users interviewed we encountered in our research.
Emily is 30 years old and lives in Paris. She enjoys museums, especially the historic ones, but she hates waiting too much in the queue. Also, she likes reading books like biographies. Indeed, the main pain points we found out in the interviews is that 86,7% are frustrated about the crowd in the museums.
Her goal is to maintain her cultural knowledges during this pandemic by discovering new things to do and to kept informed about exhibits. During the visits, she puts her headphones and listen her favorite playlist while contemplating paintings, taking pictures and strolling.
After the persona, we built Emily’s journey map to empathize more with our user.
— USER JOURNEY MAP
A User Journey Map is a tool that helps us further empathize with the user so that we can find opportunities to make their journey better. It includes persona, scenario, actions, phases of the actions, thoughts about those ones, touch points: negative and positive emotions and a list of opportunities for each phase.
SCENARIO: Emily’s journey begins when she notices an advertising in metro. Curious by nature, Emily grabs her phone to search some information and purchase two tickets at the Orsay museum to visit it the same afternoon with a friend. She arrives and waits for 30mn in rain, because of people queuing. When she enter, she barely can’t see the paintings because of the crowd. She visits the museum for 2–3 hours with her habits like listening to her favorite playlist and podcast. She finishes the visit and goes out to meet some friends in a bar and talks about her experience. She would have loved to see more of this exhibit and she feels that needs more informations to satisfy her curiosity.
SOME OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMILY
Before the visit and in front of the museum: It would be great to optimize the ticket booking app to display visitor’s affluence in order to avoid the frustration of the waiting time in the queue, it could be interesting to create games, activities, quizz and documentation related to the museum and the exhibition.
During the visit: Create interactions via the museum experience app. A gamification and quizz to increase interactions. Augmented reality to see the colors moving and coming out the frames.
After the visit: To buy books at the end of the exhibition, scan a QR Code to save information about the paintings and Virtual Reality version of the exhibition to visualize the art pieces without the crowds.
2. DEFINE
— PROBLEM STATEMENT
Now with the pain points that Emily went through and the opportunities we established, it’s time to define our problem statement. The idea is to find a way for the museums to facilitate the experience while keeping the visitors entertained at all stages of the exhibit especially during the queue which can be very annoying.
Thanks to the problem statement we found out 3 How Might We:
HMW offer an extra experience that the visitor didn’t expect to receive ?
HMW engage users’ curiosity during the queue for the exhibition ?
HMW make the visitors interact more between each other during the visit to feel less alone and to boost their experience ?
3. IDEATE
— SKETCHES
After defining the problem statement and talk about assumptions, we had a lot of ideas coming in our minds ! It’s the funniest part now: we sketched every ideas we had.
Every members of the team made some sketches, came out with different ideas, and then we put it all together. Helene thought about adding a game, with scores and trophies to unlock just like in video games. Then we sketched about how to access the quizz during the queue. Adding some levels like medium, advanced for history lovers. Should we put images ? Should we create some seasonal topics ecc. An other idea was to find a painting in the room and scan it to get the infos about the artist, but also add a musical background.
It was a really fun moment to share our sketches together. Below you will see an extract of our sketches. If you pay attention, maybe you will see the museum mascot we imagined 😉
— USER FLOW
The user flow shows the path a user takes to achieve a task on the app or website. It looks like a graph with arrows and shapes that includes a legend to explain the pages the user will see in the right order. We also talk about the “happy path”.
Before going through the low-fidelity prototype, we established the user flow.
We brainstormed together and wrote the steps of the user happy path. In order to do it, we used Miro website, it’s an online visual collaboration for teamwork, very useful for this kind of exercise.
First we thought about the entire app user flow, but we decided to focus on the biggest pain point which is the waiting time, so the quizz feature. We looked at our core feature: the enriched museum experience. Adding a layer of interaction between the user and the museum, so we decided to focus the user flow on the quizz feature.
— LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Here we are ! The finale stage of this project ! If you are still reading this cas study I hope you are as excited as we are with my teammates 😃.
Let me take you through our prototype now.
Our History lover Emily arrives in front of the museum and notices that even she bought a ticket online, there is a waiting time, a long queue in front of the museum, and it’s going to be long !
- Landing Page: She decides to take the quizz that she noticed earlier while booking on the app.
2. Difficulty level: She can select the difficulty level of the quizz. Actually we wanted to be inclusive since our audience is broad.
The activities should please our history lover as well as engage with a younger audience that might not be interested by the artwork.
3. The context: Here she has 2 options: Inside or outside the museum. She selects the first, to make the wait more educational.
And the second is to make the exhibit more interactive and memorable.
4. Culture quizz: Here Emily is doing the quizz, she has to select the wright answer and to click on the next question.. She can also skip the question if she doesn’t know how to respond it.
5. Treasure hunt: Our 5th screen shows the option 2 (Inside the museum)here we can see a little game about the paintings inside the museum, the user has to find the good painting and take a picture of it to get some points.
6. Feedback page : The user is invited to go further in his discoveries with suggested media. With the added engagement, the user might share their experience at the exhibition on social medias.
— TO GO DEEPER
To go deeper in this project of one week. We could go further testing. Actually it could be interesting to get feedbacks from the users thanks to our low-fidelity prototype.
Also we could make a mid fidelity prototype.
Think about other features such as augmented reality.
Add a profile with meta data.
Think about the AI suggestions and targeted content.
CONCLUSION
For this first project of Iron Hack bootcamp, I was glad to be part of this team. I learned a lot about the teamwork. I really enjoyed the the user interviews. How to ask the good questions, bounce off their answers, and always asking “Why” after to get more explanations and eventually to discover a new lead of reflection.
The empathy steps are really important to get good data without biases. I would like to work on a mid fidelity and high fidelity prototype for this project because it’s really challenging.
I am looking forward to work on the second project which is creating a website for a local business.
Thank you very much for reading this article, don’t hesitate to share your reactions or comments or anything that could help me improve my work. See you very soon for another case study 🙂.
