Timeline: 4 months
Role: Research group member and sole designer
Goals: Facilitate finding and learning about artworks to see in Florence to create a more exciting and engaging museum experience
Constraints: Standard museum and ticketing practices
My group's task for our UX Research Methods project was to create a digital tool related to local museums. I collaborated with my team members on research then worked individually on visual design and high-fidelity prototypes.
To better understand museum-related pain points in Florence, my group and I sent out a survey to our classmates and went to popular locations to conduct interviews.
Many interviewees bought tickets online from museum websites which were trustworthy and often a lower price. People found famous artworks to be the most valuable part of a museum visit and wanted to know more about what they were going to see.
We researched popular museum and ticket websites to understand their UI design, accessibility, functionality, and user flow. We also did SWOT analysis of two websites and our project and a positioning graph.
To get a clearer idea of our app's features and user journeys, we created personas for the right and wrong users.
We mapped out the content architecture of our app, showing pages, features, and how a user would move between them.
We wanted to test out if our idea and content archtitecture was understandable and intuitive to users. We wrote down our pages and features on sticky notes, and asked two other groups to guess our layout. This helped us uncover where things were confusing or redundant.
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At this point in the project, we started working on our own. I used our content architecture map to create wireframes.
After working on wireframes, I developed the color palette and system of icons. I was inspired by the Uffizi’s website since the color palette and typefaces felt unique compared to the other websites we researched, and it captured the essence of Florence in a modern way.
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For our final review, a guest UX/UI designer went through each project and gave comments. It was incredibly helpful to get feedback on my work and to hear his thoughts on everyone’s projects.
I realized I needed to flesh out the flow of the prototype more to show how different features would work. Watching him go through all of the prototypes also made it clear how keeping some layouts and features standard makes things feel intuitive, while some common things like having to sign up can just be annoying and not necessary.
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I made revisions to my prototype based on feedback from our final review and recent trends in technology.
My biggest change was rearranging the prototype to focus on two tasks: saving an artwork to the collection and scanning it in person. I also removed the sign up aspect and made more features functional like adding trip dates and the ticket wallet page. Our app originally “collected” art by scanning a QR code, but I think it would be much simpler to scan the art and have the app recognize it, rather than sticking QR codes onto artwork labels.
Tasks: save Primavera by Botticelli to your collection then scan it in person
