Timeline
March - June 2023
Project Type
Class Project
Role
UX Designer
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
One of the challenges in a museum is finding effective ways to tell stories. Museum Quest aims to resolve this by creating an interactive web-app focused on introducing engaging activities into a museum. The final deliverable of this project was framed as a proposal for further development and integration within the Edmonds Historical Museum.
Challenges
Develop a new interactive experience for visitors.
1.
Introduce modern technology to the user journey.
2.
Adjust the museum experience to retain future visitors.
3.
Support the primary goal of the museum - to tell stories.
4.
Timeline
Sep - Dec 2023
Role
UX Designer
Interaction Designer
Project Type
Community Project
Contribution
Scavenger Hunt
Following a traditional UX design process, my team and I started by conducting a stakeholder analysis with a representative of the Edmonds Historical Museum. Asking questions helped us understand their current approach, what their needs are as a stakeholder, as well as where new opportunities are for applying redesigns. Questions such as the following helped guide this process.
Personas
A critical part of our process was ensuring we envisioned the types of users that would get value out of our redesign.
Primary Persona
Name: Jake
Age: 32
Occupation: Construction
After a big move, Jake and his family are new to the Edmonds area. In Jake’s free time he prioritizes his family, however, one of his biggest challenges is finding attractions that everyone can enjoy. It’s also important for Jake to find an activity that would be exciting enough for his family to cherish as a memory.
Secondary Persona
Name: Iris
Age: 24
Occupation: Nurse
Iris is a new full-time working nurse trying to work as much as possible to save for a big trip someday. She loves going out on weekends and typically wants to find cheap thrills. While visiting the Edmonds farmer market, she decides to also visit The Edmonds Historical Museum since there are free admissions.
Once we understood our stakeholders needs, we needed to understand the needs of a visitor. My team members and I conducted 30 minute field observations across four different museums in the greater-Seattle area in order to advance our insights on the museum experience. Interestingly, our findings unveiled crucial opportunities for a design solution.
1. Visitors follow a dedicated path
Breaking this path to create an exploratory user journey may create an exciting experience unique with each visit.
2. Phones are already on-hand for photos
With mobile technology already existing in a supplementary context, developing a solution that supports this technology seems like a clear design direction.
3. Artifact labels are frequently skimmed
Important text was frequently skimmed, possibly from social pressure, so a redesign solution should focus on enabling visitors to read text.
Once our observations were collected, my team and I rapidly sketched ideas for a possible solution - focusing on quantity over quality. After generating 40+ ideas, we filtered through them as a team until we eventually decided on producing a mobile-first web-app activity with supplementary features such as photo opportunities and an exhibit gallery.
Information Architecture
With a list of features we plan to implement, we organized the basic hierarchy of our web-app.
IA Diagram
From this point forward, my group separated into individual roles where mine was primarily developing the scavenger hunt experience. Sketching paper wireframes before digital helped map out the navigation before translating it into a low-fidelity prototype.
Onboarding direction wireframes (1-3)
Onboarding direction wireframes (4-6)
Each team member conducted a heuristic evaluation with their low-fidelity prototype to test how effective our designs were at supporting predetermined list of 10 heuristics. Notably, I obtained four primary insights revealing the unsupported user needs within my design.
User Barriers
Users stuck on questions weren't offered support to continue through the activity.
No Celebration
Offboarding was abrupt and didn’t reward the user journey, providing no sense of closure.
Unclear Designs
The point system in challenge mode wasn't clearly communicated, hindering it's design.
Lack of Incentive
Incentives were lacking, preventing users from wanting to return to the activity.
Using the insights to guide our process in the second iteration, we developed a high-fidelity prototype as our final deliverable. Our design was tested again with more promising results compared to our first iteration. We obtained further insights from this round of tests, but a third iteration fell outside the scope of this project.
By implementing a scavenger hunt activity, users are encouraged to interact further with artifacts in the museum (and with each other). Additionally, we added digital souvenirs and an exhibit gallery for further interactive opportunities.
Designing a mobile-first web-app introduces smartphones into the museum space beyond their previous usage. Using interactive QR codes modernizes the museum experience beyond its original state.
Adding a new activity incentives the experience with family bonding, community building, and competitive challenges. This introduces new demographics to the museum space and offers a deeper inclination to revisit the space.
Focusing on adding a new activity while maintaining the relationship a visitor has with an exhibit was prioritized in development. By necessitating engagement with exhibits in our activities, this sentiment was preserved.
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Working with a community stakeholder and team while developing this project was a valuable process that achieved a fulfilling result. Testing our designs for heuristics was a new process for me that I want to continue using since it was a crucial step that unveiled insights on the efficacy of our design. From this I learned that oftentimes task completion does not equal user success. Our final deliverable was a high-fidelity prototype, however, I would be interested in testing our designs further with field tests to evaluate their efficacy in a museum.
