The Whitney’s Mobile Guide: 2021 Edition
Replacing the museum’s physical guide.
One year ago, the Covid-19 pandemic upended many aspects of daily life and we saw the Whitney close it’s doors for many months. During our reopening period, when our staff focused on making a visit to the Museum as safe as possible, we decided to forgo our physical guides. Pre-pandemic, our handout guide served as a map, current exhibition list, and a small souvenir of our audience’s time in the building, while our Mobile Guide provided supplemental and collateral content to the art on the walls. Without the physical guide, how could we expand the Mobile Guide to include key information for navigating the museum, especially given the increased importance given to the flow of people?
The challenge: to add key content to our Guide without losing the simple UX flow and entry to interpretive audio and access content. Along the way, we also wanted to make some underlying changes to the code to make the guide more semantically friendly to our audiences and more scalable as our content output grows.
Letting the art lead
The major UX change in the new guide is letting the exhibition and artworks lead audience interaction, rather than only surfacing content for specific content type tracks. So, instead of choosing a type (“access,” “general,” “kids”) to filter Guide content, our audience can now choose which exhibition or artwork they’re interested in, then select what type of content they’d like to explore. One of the great benefits to this content flow was knowing that some people might be interested in both access content (transcripts, for example) and audio guides or kids-focused content. We now surface what is available by exhibition, versus having to previously click around to see what content was available for where you were in the Museum.
Within each exhibition or artwork, we’ve applied a similarly streamlined approach to categorizing content by removing tracks. This declutters the interface for exhibitions that have limited Guide content, without making it harder to find Kids audio or access materials in content-rich exhibitions.
Additionally, we now list exhibitions without content, so our in-building audience has a full, floor-by-floor list of everything on view in the Museum so, alongside with an online map, we can provide way-finding to supplement physical signage and directions in the galleries.
Under the hood
In addition to UX and design improvements, we used this opportunity to streamline and scale the application to better prepare the Mobile Guide for the coming years. Still a Progressive Web App and integrated with the broader whitney.org, we reorganized the data structure the frontend sits on with an eye toward potential changes and expansions in types of content held in the Guide, as well as broader language support. The hope is, when content is ready from different departments in the Museum, we’ll be able to quickly and nimbly pick up and integrate in the current system without having to build in many months of time to rearchitect the application.
It takes a village
A repository of work by many different departments in the Museum, the updates to the Mobile Guide are thanks to our partners in the Education department, our Digital Content team, and thanks especially to Graphic Design, who worked tirelessly with our team in Digital Development to get this just right.
Read more about our initial Mobile Guide release.
