Since the pandemic, the traditionally in-person museum discoveries have transformed into novel digital encounters. Now in many parts of America, people have adjusted to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and museums have begun to re-open:
“How might we help people discover local museums and increase their engagement with the impact of the pandemic?”
Our team consists of Clair, Arshin, and Meijie. We are exploring a new way to build and sustain the museum-visitor relationship in our digital-turned society since COVID.
Challenges
“According to World Economic Forum and UNESCO, lockdown has forced about 85,000 museums to close their doors, and 13% may never recover at all”¹
Challenges arise since the pandemic. With fewer opportunities for physical interaction, museums can no longer rely on walk-in visitors and their old model of in-person marketing. Looking at the digital ways of marketing and maintaining visitors, museums don’t have a concise, quick, centralized place like many other businesses or nonprofits. This under-developed digital presence leads to three specific challenges:
Goals
- Help visitors discover museums and exhibitions to increase museum engagement
- Improve and sustain the ongoing relationship between museums and visitors
- Motivate users to donate and raise funds for different initiatives for museums
Our Proposal
We created MUSE, a go-to app for visitors to discover and explore museums. The app will allow people to find upcoming events with the event feature, discover museums with the browse feature, revisit memories of their museum visit with the memories feature, and support causes at local museums with the donation feature. Based on the user’s calendar, Muse will notify users of events and activities to encourage more visits.
Design Process
Context and Scope
Our research is divided into three parts: understanding the museum, knowing the visitors, and exploring the existing platforms.
Part I: Understanding the digital museum landscape
We examined official websites from 10 museums and made an information architecture map for each website to understand their information hierarchy, leadership composition, networks, and donation models.
Part II: Knowing the Visitors
We went through research about visitors’ motivation of visiting the museums and brainstormed the problems they might have during their visits. This helped us define our challenges in the later section.
Part III: Exploring Existing Platforms
Lastly, we looked at the existing platforms, with a focus on individual museum apps to understand if there is any gap or opportunity in the current landscape. Through exploration, we found most museums have their own app. However, not many apps have reviews or ratings which indicates that there are few actual users. Even if some apps have reviews and ratings, many are around 1–3 stars out of 5 stars.
Discovery Research
After the preliminary research, now it’s a good time to conduct discovery interviews to identify the domain gaps and specific challenges.
In the current landscape, we identified two focus groups to interview: museums and their visitors. We contacted several museums in Pittsburgh and San Francisco and were able to talk to two museum staff and several visitors.
Some Quotes from the Museum:
“During COVID, it becomes much more challenging to receive fundings”
“It is hard to maintain a close relationship with visitors after their initial visits”
“After COVID happens, most physical interaction became virtual”
From these quotes, we concluded that the challenges for Museums are:
- receiving enough fundings
- maintaining an engaging relationship with visitors
- branding to attract a wider range of audience
Some Quotes from the Visitors:
“I would love to have something that always reminds me of going to museums”
“I didn’t know there is an app for XX museum”
“I don’t think I would download one app for each museum I visited”
The aforementioned feedback validates our assumptions about their needs:
- reminders for visiting museums
- a more engaging experience in the museum
- an easy and convenient way of discovering and planning their trip to the museum.
Audience & Needs
After our interviews, we found the right group of customers who has different levels of interest in museums and are familiar with technologies. We grouped them into four different personas.
Concept Exploration
We have identified two main groups of stakeholders: visitors and museums. For each iteration, we interviewed these two groups as well as domain experts who have either worked or did research in the filed. This helps to get more comprehensive feedback on our feature set to validate the design decisions.
Throughout many cycles of user and stakeholder interviews, concept iterations, and validations, our product evolved through three main phases: AR Activities, Tour Guides, and Discovery.
Idea One: AR Activities
Our first ideation is about having an app that supplements the in-museum experience using Augmented Reality. However, besides the technology limitation, users also did not want to take their devices out and move them around when museums were crowded, and the experience seemed obtrusive to their natural experience instead.
Idea Two: Tour Guides
Our second idea is about exploring in-person guided tours for museums. We tested this idea with 10 user groups and 2 stakeholders and identified issues such as maintaining the map and layout over several months and years, the location accuracy suboptimal, and the difficulty in scaling this feature across multiple museums. Many participants also mentioned their preference for having a more free and self-guided experience
With the context of COVID-19, we started exploring ways to help visitors and museums
Idea Three: Discovery
We believe looking outwards to help users stay engaged with museums is more useful than developing another fancy AR or tour-guide app to use inside the museum, especially since museums’ updates will become fully digital and require online ticketing for specific time slots after the pandemic. In such a context, developing a schedule-based search method would be more beneficial in helping people connect with museums at ease. We went with this idea, where we want to help strengthen this new model of digital encounters with museums online.
For initial Low-fi ideas, we explored many different apps that focused on cultural aspects to understand different patterns and forms of information people tend to look for, and museums typically present to people. We decided to narrow down to two ways of exploration: cultural and event-based exploration.
Here we are showing the stages of mid-to-high fidelity exploration for our discovery idea. We select a few critical design exploration and decisions based on feedback from users and museum experts.
Hi-Fi Interactions
Feature One: Discover in-person and virtual art events
A calendar-synced event function that will show personalized events that fit in people’s free time. It also provides virtual events that people can just register to attend instantly!
When users first open the app, a bottom notification will pop to offer users more knowledge on the current situation with COVID-19 and how it has influenced the local museums. It will also includes new guidelines on how to stay safe in museums during COVID-19.
Feature Two: Visit museums and exhibitions that really interest you
Users can discover museums in a totally novel way by browsing different artifacts. Based on their preference, they will be able to see the museum that hosts the artifact they are interested in and plan their visit accordingly.
Feature Three: Build your museum memory box with photos and digital collections:
Build your museum memory box with photos and digital collections:
After using this app for a while, users will be able to receive their unique memory boxes documenting their past visits and favorite artifacts from the museum. It acts like a diary that allows users to make notes, share, and explore similar artifacts in our collection database using machine learning.
Feature Four: Support Museums through Causes
A new model for donation where the user can donate in small-amount to the local museums for relatable causes. This gives the user a way of showing his/her true support and sees the effects of it. We hope to bond the community by delivering the message: contributing to your own community!
Notification
Users can utilize the notifications from MUSE by getting real-time updates of new exhibitions, events, donations, and membership activities to always engage with their favorite museums effortlessly.
Moving Forward
This project is realized with the help from CMU professor Marti Louw and several Pittsburgh museums including Mattress Factory and the Frick Art Museum. We would like to give special thanks to them and we look forward to developing the concept to the next stage.
For our next stage, we plan to get more feedback from the visitor side and implement the designs into a product in the app store. Here is an architectural diagram that captures our implementation plan.
We are going to conduct user testing and use KPIs and success metrics after implementing each feature in order to get validation for the concept and adjust the measure of success accordingly.
Hope you enjoyed learning about our product, and are excited to try it out once it is available on the app store. Please show your appreciation using “claps”. Any questions or feedback in the comments section is welcome!
[1]: World Economic Forum. (June 29 2020). This Is Why Museums Are Crucial For A Healthy, Happy Society After Covid-19 https://www.weforum.org/videos/his-is-why-museums-are-crucial-for-a-healthy-happy-society-after-covid-19?collection=world-vs-coronavirus
[2]: Impacts experiences. (April 05 2017). Are Mobile Apps Worth It For Cultural Organizations? (DATA) https://www.colleendilen.com/2017/04/05/are-mobile-apps-worth-it-for-cultural-organizations-data/
[3]: NEA Research Report. (January 2015). A Decade of Arts Engagement https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-feb2015.pdf
[4]: Association of Art Museum Directors. ART MUSEUMS BY THE NUMBERS 2014 https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Art%20Museums%20By%20The%20Numbers%202014_0.pdf
