Wicked problem : how might we help museums in 21th century ?
My 1st UX case study
This well known Covid-19 was the cherry on the cake of visits’ decline in museums but what about this cake ?
During my UX-UI bootcamp at Ironhack, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Lotte Moerman, Hajrah Mushtaq , and Gabriel Rabadán Camacho on this case study and seek answers to this question. We followed a design thinking process with our eclectic brains to find solutions for this challenging problem :
“How Might We help museums bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?”
Preliminary research
In order to be more familiar with the subject we did some interesting researches with Google, Google Trends, previous UX work and Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) Museum Index and found really good data to start our journey.
Empathize
We followed a non-linear and iterative methodology which gives designers a deep user’s understanding, avoid assumptions and get a better work organisation for solving problems.
Step one, empathize. We collected thoughts from preliminary research and our expertises in a Lean Survey canva. This helped us to find which quantitative data we will need and structure our surveys.
SURVEYS
We collected 117 responses about our users habits, from their love of cultural outings through their time and location preference, favorite person to go with, average budget and ending with their motivations and frustrations. Once we sorted out we selected our key-datas.
INTERVIEWS
After collecting quantitative data, we saved some qualitative data to see the Big Picture through our 5 interviews results. We followed the same list of questions but did not hesitate to go with the flow and recover the most natural responses.
“ If there’s a queue I would not go. ” Lotte’s boyfriend
“ I like sharing moments with my friends, going to museums is a unique way. ” Caroline
“ As you know, we are in Covid..” Hajra’s husband
“ It is usually hard to find a good quality museum of my Interest.” Inaki
“ Last exhibition seemed cooler on instagram.” Caroline
“ I like museums that are more interactive.” Caroline
Define
At this stage in the Design Thinking process we put all of the data we collected during the Empathize step. We analyzed it and put them in order by topics with Affinity Diagram and pick the most important topics or sticky note by Dot Voting. Through this work we were able to make links and highlight some relevant point by ending with “How might we..” session.
Adding to this, we also structure our work with a collaborative tool to gain a deeper insight : an Empathy Map (originally created by Dave Gray) . It represents a group of users and how we are seeing the situation through his eyes.
Gains
- Learning new things
- Finding inspiration
- Self-Development
- Quality time with friend
- Great exhibition
- Intellectual entertainment
Pains
- Not interesting
- Too crowded
- Queue
- Ticket price
- Covid restrictions
- Overrated
USER PERSONA & USER JOURNEY
Now we have spotted our user persona, she is Jane Dot, art advocate, 28 years old. We created this user from all of our previous work to personify and create a more realistic point of view.
Here we have a visual interpretation of the overall story when our user, Jane, interacts within the ecosystem identifying possible touch-points with our future product and how we could turn them into opportunities.
Opportunities we found :
- Virtual options
- Limit crowd / queue
- Search on interest
- Search on location
- Discounts
- Share Interest
- Interact
PROBLEM STATEMENT
When we combined all this work we had reached agreement that our problem statement was obvious :
“Culture lovers need a way to find cultural heritage resources in a more accessible way because the troublesome process of finding a favorable option makes them lose their interest and decline cultural visits.”
Ideate
The third stage of Design Thinking is Ideate. During this stage, we started to use the information from all stages before to create ideas, even the original ones. Thanks to our opportunities found in the User Journey we brainstormed for few minutes without talking to each others and we arrived at this mindmap :
After this, it was easy to have a better idea of our product. We set a timer to 15min and sketched our ideas for 5 screens. We reiterated Dot Voting as democracy lovers and keeped the best features for our future prototype.
Prototype
Once we choosed our favorite ones, we started to do a paper protype which will be used for testing.
We included basic features (infos, prices, location…) and some more specific like Covid updates, realtime informations about crowd or potential friends already at the exhibition, and created a community space and virtual touring section.
Test
After paper prototyping, we tested it on 5 users from innovators to early majority. All of them liked the concept and found it useful. They were positively surprised and gave us precious feedbacks.
NEXT STEPS
We will have to finish the mid-fi versions and do the usability test. And, incorporate all the feedback we will recover.
MAIN KEY LEARNINGS
We had to not follow our assumptions, but tools such as Lean Survey canvas, Affinity Diagram helped us to structure the information, work in a sync way and respect the timings. We also had to avoid distractions such as interesting but irrelevant details. Interviews gave us a good understanding of the actual “WHY ?”, why they go to museums and why they don’t go.
Our possible apprehension in this project is maybe creating a space with a lot of messy informations, overloaded. But it can be a real success with an optimized platform, all-in-one app, where users can find everything easily.
It was such a great journey ! Working remotely with complete strangers can be awkward but we were all excited by our challenge. There was always one of us to motivate our team and stimulate us to do best, we used all our energies throughout our first team project.
