Museums and public institutions - Case study

For my first Case study at Ironhack my group and I were given a wicked problem about Museums and public institutions.

How Might We help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?

I believe museums are institutions that should be close to the people, helping them find a solution to make culture more accessible is was a really interesting task.

Covid crisis was really hard on museums and they really need people to come back and visit them. So how could we improve this to make it easier and more accessible to everyone?

Users & audience

I started doing research on this topic with my group, we defined a number of questions that were pertinent to the research and we created a survey that gave us more information about the problems and expectations of people around 38 people answered our survey.

We also had 5 interviews with different users and this part was really interesting because we could empathise with the users and find what their pain points are.

Some interesting results from our survey research

57% get informed through social media

45.8% would not go to a museum because of the price

42 % are students and intermediate occupation.

Some interesting quotes we got from the user interviews:

“I went because the first Sunday of the month is free”

‘’It’s not really obvious to book a ticket ; it don’t really know how to find the lowest prices’’

“I would like a website where you can see all the exhibitions.”

“Prices can be too high”

“I would like an application which can with a logarithm, generates expositions according to our previous choices.”

Roles & responsibilities

For this project i worked with Matthieu, Tina, Hanane and Laetitia Victoire. We all had different roles and worked together, helped each other with our different skills. We were able to collaborate together using Miro, Figma, Zoom and google drive as we were all in different places.

Scope & contraints

We had little time to do all this work and we were discovering many things still. The bootcamp classes are really interesting, we had to work quickly we worked against the clock with the group and we did everything on time.

Process

For this project we decided to use different steps, empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.

Affinity map

Once we had the answers of the users we went to the next stage and created an affinity map using post-its and we started sorting them by categories the post-its to start finding pain points and decide what we were going to do next.

After this we found out three things

Insight 1 : Users need to go to museums when entrance is free.

Insight 2 : Users need an effortless way to find new and trendy museum exhibitions.

Insight 3 : Users need a way to avoid queuing

Empathy Map

For the next stage we categorized users’ testimonials into attitudinal and behavioral data and synthesized rational and sentimental aspects of our users through their situation, acts, feelings and emotions.

What we learned :

Users get informed by advertising and by relatives advices to discover new museum exhibition, but they don’t know how to quickly find them by their own.

Users go at the museum for day free entrance but they don’t know when they happen, they have to check on each museum website.

Persona

With all this information we could create a persona in order to define who is the main type of user we are working for. Our user was called Museum Melissa and is a student who likes going out and likes to go to free events.

User journey map

Creating an user journey map was really interesting because we could see exactly where the pain points were and helped us find a better solution to the problem. We follow Melissa from the moment where she decides to go to the museum until the moment she comes out from it.

Storyboard

Using the info on the user journey i did a storyboard in order to show our user’s problem in a better way. For this i drew using photoshop and a wacom tablet.

Problem Statement

Melissa, an almost graduate student, needs to have access to affordable museum tickets, because she and her friends are interested in discovering arts in museums but with a limited budget.

We know that we’ll succeed when 10 users like Melissa will validate our first MID-FI prototype.

Problem hypothesis

So, we believe using a platform that is connected to different museum booking systems, will achieve the user finding tickets with the best price for his or her situation.

We will know we are wrong if museums visit frequency doesn’t increase more than 10% during the post app first year launch.

With this in mind we decided to create an application to help users access tickets according to their budget, all museums in one place and all info on one place for each expo and at the same time avoid waiting too long to buy a ticket.

Ideate

In order to be able to create our prototypes we needed to put in paper our ideas.

A remote crazy 8 helped us get some ideas quickly on paper. One paper, 8 ideas in 8 minutes for each of us, then we decided on the most interesting ones. This helped us create a “happy path” for our app.

It looked a little like this:

With this info we could know what features we wanted for sure in the app and decide the kind of app we were going to build.

Pitch of the app

Most of the museums already offer free entrances or discount tickets.

Despite of this, during our researches we realised that people don’t go to museum due to the high prices.

There is a lack of information that we believe our solution will solve by providing all the museum offers in one place.

Prototype

For this project we only had the time to go as far as Lo Fi Prototype iterate one time and recreate another prototype in order to validate the idea and define a preliminary layout.

In the first three screens you see the user can scroll and discover recommandations and find some interesting place to go with friends, then chooses one and invites friends.

The next three screens you can see that two friends can be selected from the list and then the ticket can be selected and bought

A confirmation appears with a qr code of the ticket. There is also the possibility to see current and past tickets and access the ticket code with all the info for the event.

A link to the prototype can be found here

Testing

We needed to be sure we were on the right path before investing more time on this prototype. So we had 5 people test our prototype and we found out that :

Users want a cleaner way to navigate the app.

Users want to understand the main home page purpose right away.

Users want a more logical way to interact with the filter.

Users want the “current ticket” area to stand out more compared to the “past event” tickets.

After this we iterated the design in order to make it better.

Iterate

For these screens we removed the bottom bar because users got confused, a filter button was added in order to help the user choose what they want.

A new screen for the filter was made also.

For this part the past events part was modified to be less present in the page and make current events tickets more visible.

Outcomes & lessons

Doing this research helped us understand that before Covid, museums were doing really well and that there were many options for people to go in a cheaper way, but the problem was mainly accessing the information of each place on an easier way and the access to the place itself.

This project helped me understand the path UX designers use to solve user’s problems, as i used to have more experience with UI than UX it was a great way for me to understand many things i didn’t know and review stuff i learning during my classes at Ironhack and i had a great time working on this project with this amazing group.