GalleryPal
Museum Guide Mobile App
The Problem
Art is an incredibly vast and constantly growing world. It is impossible for even the most enthusiastic art connoisseur or academic expert to know everything about the world of art. For this reason, without some information or context of a piece of art and its creator, museum and gallery visitors have a difficult time truly appreciating and enjoying art. While museums and galleries curate guided tours to help provide some context, visitors prefer to freely gravitate towards the pieces that speak to them.
The Solution
Museums and galleries are looking to better leverage modern technology to improve the in-person art viewing experience and increase visitor satisfaction. GalleryPal is looking to build a visual guide mobile app to address the individual needs, interests, and preferences of museum and gallery visitors.
My Role
I was the UI/UX designer responsible for conducting a modified version of the GV Design Sprint to design a solution for GalleryPal, a visual museum guide app.
Day 1 - Understand/Map
I began to identify the problem through user research. I was provided with a brief full of quotes and insights from museum visitors expressing their issues. From reading the brief, it was clear that people who visit museums are genuinely interested in getting information and learning, but they have their own particular ways of going about this learning experience.
Research Insights
Visitors often conduct a quick Google search for a painting on their phones, but they can usually only find long, super overwhelming articles.
Visitors enjoy looking at art, but feel like they are missing out on the full experience because they do not know any background info or context.
Visitors Like to do their own thing (don’t enjoy group tours), but will sometimes listen in on the tours to learn a bit.
Visitors would love to know more about the process and technique and possibly even hear directly from the artist about their influences.
Key Quotes
“I enjoy going to the museum, I often leave feeling like I didn’t appreciate the art to its full potential”
“I don’t need to know EVERYTHING. I just don’t want to feel like I was missing out on something.”
End-to-End User Experience Mapping
After gathering the key insights from the user research, I mapped out a possible end-to-end experience that a GalleryPal user might have.
Day 2 - Sketch
Lightning Demo
I researched existing museum apps from some of the biggest, most prestigious museums around the world including the Guggenheim Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I chose to focus on two apps in particular that presented interesting and inspiring solutions:
Getty Museum App
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles offers a very appealing app experience. They effectively utilize the Nielsen-Norman group heuristic of “Aesthetic & Minimalist Design.” It is not convoluted with a bunch of features, but simply provides curated tours and exhibitions that users can choose from. The minimalist design keeps the users focused on the primary goal of exploring the art pieces throughout the museum. Additionally, this app is clearly designed with the heuristic of “User control & freedom” in mind as users can easily exit out of any content they may accidentally tap on, which is surprisingly helpful especially when trying to navigate through the seemingly endless maze of galleries in a museum.
The National Gallery App
The National Gallery in Washington D.C. offers a very intriguing app that seems to be very well liked according to the app store reviews. In accordance with the “Flexibility & efficiency of use” heuristic, the app features an interactive map that users can use to search for certain pieces and offers users the option of selecting audio guides and/or written descriptions for each art piece. Furthermore, I particularly like how the app maintains both internal and external consistency by following industry standards and using terminologies that users expect to see when they visit an art museum, and thus, they can easily navigate through the app experience.
Sketches
To come up with a solution, I drew Crazy 8 sketches of the main screen a user would use to get more information about a piece of art and go on a self-guided tour. This exercise forced me to think creatively in a very short period of time, which produced a diverse collection of possible solutions. For my most critical screen, I selected the art identification screen. This is the feature of the app that gives the user the greatest control over their museum experience so that the user can freely examine the pieces that speak to them.
I then created a three-panel board that shows the critical screen as well as the screen that comes directly before and after it.
Day 3 - Decide
I expanded the three-panel board and created a multi-panel storyboard that lays out the UI elements and information architecture. This storyboard shows the red route or the main task that users would be looking to accomplish by using the app.
I decided to draw out all the interactions that a returning user would experience as they select the museum that they are visiting, understand the basics of that museum through a brief introduction, select a pre-set tour or choose to explore on their own, identify a piece of their choosing, and easily digesting key information/context regarding the piece.
Day 4 - Prototype
I built a prototype of my app in Sketch and designed the screens that I sketched out in the storyboard. Inspired by the Getty app and the National Gallery app, I went with a very simplistic look and feel for my design. I went with the cool blue as my primary color as I wanted to create a calm vibe as museums can be overwhelming with the amount of information to consume. I chose the brighter red as the secondary color as I wanted certain aspects to pop out and capture the user’s attention. I wanted to make sure that the font was not only easy to read, but also provided a feeling of curiosity and education without being overly academic or uptight.
Day 5 - User Testing
I conducted one round of remote usability testing through Zoom with 5 participants. All 5 participants indicated an interest in art museums and galleries and 2 of the participants had been to a museum in the past 6 months while the other 3 participants had been to a museum in the past year. All participants indicated their intentions to go visit museums once the COVID-19 situation subsides.
Overall the solution was very successful. All of the participants had no problems going through the screens and understanding how to navigate the app and use the features as intended. The participants particularly liked how they had the options to choose from various pre-curated tours and freely explore on their own. Many of the participants highlighted the photo-taking feature as their favorite part of the app. Since they already often used their smartphones to take photos in their daily lives, they appreciate the familiarity of the feature.