When I first got the brief for this project, the first thing that came through my mind was an experience I had at the National Gallery in London.
Back then, I had a rough time to get around, and I immediately got interested to learn about how other people felt about their experience there, what the stakeholders where looking into, and learn more about the user's perspective at that space.
Either by having uninterested peers or not having much time in town, youngsters tend to feel anxious while visiting the gallery. A sense of possibly wasting their precious vacation time and wanting to have the best possible experience can be overwhelming.
Quickly check tour duration options and choose the right one for you
Easily locate artwork, artists and exhibitions and find your way around
Intuitive onboard presenting features and instructions throughout the app
How do we develop a platform that better engage the youth with this kind of spaces?
To learn about how young adults are interacting with art spaces, I looked for statistics from the England's Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sports. From this data I had some interesting insights.
Just under 40% of young adults report not having enough time as the main reason for not visiting museums or galleries.
Shorter visits are more appealing to this particular generation.
Both spending time with family and accompanying children come up as main reasons to visit a museum.
The National Gallery lacks support for parents and children at the moment.
After gathering quantitative results, I found important to get some qualitative ones. That's when I went after interviewees from our target search group.
I decided to interview three male and five female identifying young adults.
Either by having uninterested peers or not having much time in town, youngsters tend to feel anxious while visiting the gallery.
A sense of possibly wasting their precious vacation time and wanting to have the best possible experience can be overwhelming.
After the interviews, I created empathy maps in order to easily understand and explain what I've learned from users.
From then, I was able to pinpoint two main personas who we should focus on for this project.
The first one being based on international young adults who are visiting the city for a limited time and the second being based on young adults who usually motivates their household to visit the gallery.
After that, user journey maps where created in order to help identify obstacle-free paths for users, highlight pain points, and identify improvement opportunities.
In this phase, defining unspoken user's pain points and using them to form strong problem statements was a main objective, followed by hypothesis on how to design solutions to those problems.
Having in mind the previously developed research, problem statements and hypothesis statements, a list of all features and benefits came up with for my product was created. Then I moved on to answering questions such as "what does my product do?" and "why should the user care"
With these answers I was able to identify unique value propositions and filter out the ones that were not actually beneficial to the users.
In order to build a well-rounded foundation of knowledge about the market the product will enter, I conducted a competitive audit. That knowledge was carried into my designs and helped create a product that’s helpful and unique for users.
In sequence, to anticipate user needs when interacting with your product, user flows were created clearing and simplifying an outline for their app experience.
This big picture storyboard focus on what the user needs, their context, and why the product will be useful to the user.
The close-up storyboard, on the other hand, concentrate on the product and how it works.
The IA chart used in order to organize and sort the information that the design presents, so users can successfully experience and interact with the app.
Crazy Eights was the exploration method used to try and think outside the box and you have to come up with many ideas in a short time frame, without judging them. This meant to quickly develop many options for each frame and being able to nitpick qualities from different propositions.
To learn about the lucky individuals tasked with building the culture of their workplace I sent a survey to a targeted set of contacts that were in HR roles. I then took the responses through a card sorting exercise to find common themes amongst the respondents.
After the UI team updated the mid-fidelity prototype I animated the prototype so that it was a closer reflection of how our users would be interacting with the app.
I conducted five user testing sessions from the user's perspective as well as frame testing to ensure that the information architecture of the overall app made sense.
Some changes were then made to ensure the best usability for the users.
After user testing, it was clear that the users benefited from different access forms to reach audioguides and artwork in geral.
Users had trouble engaging with some features such as liking artwork guides and being able to remove artwork from their queue.
In the end, I was extremely proud of the final product I'd created (30+ screens) and how far we'd come in just three weeks.
This project was developed with Musa, a waste management company looking to better establish their on-site survey operation.
Explore case studyHere you can have a peak on what I've worked on during my time as an UX Designer at Invent.
