Culture & Heritage — UX Design Case Study
Introduction
Since the 70’s, museums and public institutions have been affected by a crisis. They are considered obsolete. Measures have been taken to make them more attractive, but this is not enough. The arrival and development of digital that facilitates access to artworks, and the health crisis of COVID in 2020, are new negative impact that affect museums. Yet their missions are very important; is it to make heritage accessible for all.
❓ — Problem statement
The problem we will solve here is: How might we help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfil their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century.
Our goal is to follow the process of design thinking to identify the problem and then to find a solution.Eventually we need to provide at least one mid-fi wireframe.
Scope & Constraints
To realize this project, we were 4 UX Designers. We didn’t know each other, and it was our first big UX project. We have worked remotely and we used collaborative tools such as Mural, Google Drive, Zoom or Figma.
We had a time limit of 9 days, and we had to apply the design thinking method. Time limits will not allow us to test the solution. About this one, there are no specific requirements. We were totally free.
PROCESS
Briefly here are the steps of the methodology used : we first empathize to identify the problem by doing Primary and secondary research, an affinity diagram. Then we define by doing a persona and a user journey map who lead us to our problem statement. At that time our mission was to find a solution , in order to do so, we Ideated to create the user flow and built a low-fi prototype.
Empathize
Research
We reviewed articles, surveys and apps that offered content on art and museums. This researched allowed us to find:
- Who are visiting museum :
- The largest part of visitors have at least a BAC +3.
- The 18–30 year olds represent 40% of the visitors .
- Children are an audience that museums seek to reach.
- Where do we go to the museum?
More than 50% of the visits take place in Paris and Ile de France.
- What kind of museums are visited?
The most attractive museums were museums dedicated to art. They represent 64% of the visits. They are followed by the History Museums, which represent 18% of the visits. It is clear that art is much preferred to other museums.
- How do museums try to attract visitors?
They are trying to offer new experiences by adding digital devices (tablet, VR) in museums. Unfortunately the health crisis pushes us to ask if it will still function after the sanitary crisis because this device has to be shared by the visitors. During the lockdown, museums and institutions increased their presence on social networks to offer more content from their collections, but also to propose events such as virtual tours.
The why appeared with our primary research.
We interviewed 4 people, who have at least a bac+3, between 22 and 27 years old and lived in Paris. All of them had an interest in culture and art.
Before proceeding with the interviews, we wrote an interview guide in order to collect the right information and to be able to understand and compare ideas.
Through the interviews, we find that the price was a pain point about museum and exhibition ;
“ Unfortunately 25 € is already too much for me ”
This point comes up in every interview.
We also found that learning was the motivation for going to the museum.
“ I love to learn new things when I go to an exhibition ”
Yet this mission was not well accomplished. Museum pedagogy was seen as a weak point.
“There’s a communication problem in museums; there’s just the painting, the cardboard, and nothing more. “
“ Museums aren’t really fun. ”
Visitors wish to share their emotions and feelings about the visit they have just made.
“I love to share my feelings from a painting, and also to know about my friends emotions from it”
The COVID’s context highlighted the ways in which visitors can learn about cultural activities. It revealed that people were not using general websites or apps about culture, but only the official pages of museums and institutions, and following artists on social networks.
Affinity diagram
To gather and analyze all these insights we did an affinity diagram on MURAL. Each of us wrote one idea by sticky note for the interviews we did, and then we added the sticky notes from the secondary research. We have classified them, and we used dot voting to keep 4 categories :
- The price
- User expectation before the exhibition
- User expectation during the exhibition
- App/website
Define
Users & audience
At that time, we started to to have a better overview of the problem, by prioritizing information and pain points, we were able to build know who was our users and we create our persona ; Emma. A young woman, between 20 and 35 years old, living in Paris or a major city. She is curious, sensitive, passionate and dynamic. Her motivation to go to museums is to get more cultural knowledge, and share this new knowledge with her friends. She is going to the museum between 1 and 3 times a month. Her frustrations are the lack of information about the works she sees in the museums, the high prices of the museums.
User journey map
To have a more clear view about our pain points we did the user journey map. We created a timeline with all the steps of a visit to the museum which were explained to us during our interviews, and we represented by a line the emotions it stirred.
The map below highlights two problems indicated by a star. The first one is the price, the second one is the lack of information about the artist, the context of production of the masterpiece, the symbolism of the artwork… This is our designs opportunities.
Problem Statement
The persona and the user journey map allows us to visualize the pain point that leads us to our problem statement :
Emma, a curious and dynamic culture addict who enjoys going to the museum
needs a way to have access to the context, the stories and the symbolism behind the art piece that she loves,
because getting knowledge is one of her essential needs in life, and she is losing interest and emotional intensity by undertaking too many steps badly affect her need to become a better version of herself.
The reason why we didn’t focus our solution on museum entrance fees, even though this is a pain point. It is because our brief asked us to help museums and public institutions, therefore, it seemed complicated to us to intervene on one of the sources of income of those who could be considered as the initiators of the project.
Ideation
Crazy 8’s
To ideate we did a Crazy 8’s composed of three rounds. One of the ideas that was presented during the first round was a parrot that you will have on your shoulder during an exhibition. The parrot would give you all the informations you need to know more about art. After classifying our other ideas, and did a dot voting we joked about this parrot and as a result, the idea of a Tamagotchi that should be fed with works of art and museum visits, was born. This idea made the unanimity, and this is how our best gamification feature came to life !
With this ideas we create and prioritized three features :
- A paint scanner that provides additional information about the artwork and feeds the Tamagotchi by scanning art pieces.
- A gallery accessible to our “friends” where we can put the works that we have more
- A profile page with Tamagotchi’s information (levels, XP points…)
Userflow
Once the different features were defined we started designing the userflow of the app on Figma.
Prototype
Then we created the low-fi prototype of the main feature, the one who solves the pain point ; the artwork scanner.
The steps are as follows:
- Enter into the app
- Capture the art
- Confirm that the app find the correct one
- Access to the content about the art. You can like the content or share it.
- Listen to a podcast that allows us to keep watching the piece of art. He can also use a different medium as video, or articles/books.
When the task is done, the Tamagotchi stirs to inform that he has eaten well and gained points. With these points you can level up and your avatar evolves, as you can see on the image below.
This app that we called Know-Eats, brings more knowledge about the specificities of an artwork and gives fun to the museum visit !
OUTCOMES & LESSONS
Results
To measure the success of the application, we could, before the implementation of the solution and thanks to interviews with users at the end of the exhibitions, note what they retained from the works exhibited with and without the additional information function.
And after implementing the solution, we could look at the app use-rate and the use-rate of both “like” and “save” features of the app.
Lessons
I would like to underline two specific points that I was able to have a better understanding through the project.
The first one concerns the first step of our project; Find the problem.
By following the steps of the design thinking, I finally understood why it was essential to spend time on this part. Because we are not expert, taking the time to find out where the problem is allows us to have a precise overview of the situation.
Also, this project made me realize how hard it was to allow ourselves to unleash our imagination and creativity. Our Crazy 8’s illustrates this very well. The parrot was one of the first ideas suggested but we excluded it right away (like many other crazy ideas) and yet it was this abandoned idea that seemed fun but totally absurd that led us to the solution. This project was extremely interesting and fun (thanks to my teammates !). I learned a lot about the design thinking process, but the thing I keep in mind is to not put limits to our creativity, the craziest ideas can lead to the most innovative project!
Thank you very much for reading me. If you wish to give me your feedback, I will be happy to read them :)
