top of page

GalleryPal

Role: UX Designer

Google Design Sprint challenge: enhance the visitor's experience for art galleries and museums 

Duration: 2 Months

Tool: Figma

After reading about the GV Design Sprint, I decided to test it out, so I chose something I am most passionate about – GalleryPal. This challenge is about improving the experience of viewing art in a museum. As an art enthusiast and frequent museum visitor myself, I often wonder if there could be a way to make my trip to museums a better experience. Therefore, I formed this fly-solo Design Sprint team, literally just me, to explore.

Problem Statement

Luckily, Bitesize UX had already gathered user information on what they liked and disliked about viewing art.   

Based on their research, I noticed that: 

  1. Most people don’t know much about the exhibition before visiting the museum which makes visitors feel like they are missing out on the full experience. 

  2. When they try to do some research on the phone, only long articles are found which can be very overwhelming. It is hard to find just small fun facts about the piece or the artist. 

They had caused increased dissatisfaction in visitors’ experience which triggered negative ripple effects such as losing visitors. Therefore, galleries and museums are trying to provide a better in person experience when viewing art. That’s how GalleryPal came up. 

 

So as a designer, how can I solve this problem? In other words, what are the HMW questions that need to be answered here? 

  • HMW deliver the background information about an exhibition or an artwork in a quick way so visitors can get an idea about the exhibition before they start or during the tour? 

  • HMW make lengthy information about the artworks less overwhelming?  

  • HMW make the visiting experience more interactive so visitors feel more involved? 

 

With these questions in mind, I started the design process.

Understand/Map

Following the GV process, on the first day I created a journey map because it helps me visualize a user’s process in order to accomplish the goal.

Screen Shot 2022-11-22 at 5.35.49 PM.png

According to a regular museum visitor’s routine, there are usually two major user journeys, shown below.

  1. Search for a specific museum and start the tour based on their location. 

  2. Look for a specific art piece and read about the background information.

The user map definitely added more clarity to explain the user process hence magnifying where the problem is: 

  1. Information given about the artwork is uncategorized – readers will lose interest at the first glance. 

  2. Poor UI design – bad visual hierarchy. 

 

I put together some examples from the most famous museum Apps to verify.

Therefore, to solve the problem, I want my design to be: 

  • Organized with clear visual hierarchy 

  • Better categorization with straightforward information 

  • User friendly navigation and product interaction

Sketch

I then started sketching my ideas on paper. Inspirations from other Apps really helped me on this step, examples include DailyArt and WikiArt. 

 

WikiArt categorized the descriptions of an artwork into “Wikipedia”, “Artist”, “Related”, and “Links'' which created a clear information architecture for users to browse. Its interactiveness keeps users engaged by going through different tabs and looking for more information. 

 

I also really liked the idea of getting morning notification of “artwork of the day” from DailyArt. The App has done an excellent job on curating the artwork and the description by using innovative and organized visual hierarchy. 

 

So I jotted down some ideas that came up from the inspirations (aka. Lightning demo).

After I had my lightning demos, I spent 8 minutes drawing out 8 different possibilities for my final screens. I made my Crazy 8s that illustrate the homepage:

Decide - The Solution

I decided to take inspiration from the DailyArt App and include “art of the day” on the homepage since it is a fun way to introduce more artworks to users and also keep them engaged with the product. Users are able to find a specific artwork in two ways, either utilizing the search bar or going through a museum tour guide. Both ways are straightforward to navigate through the interface. Information is categorized into “about”, “technique”, “background”, “fun facts”, and “related”, which gives a broad and detailed explanation about the artworks. Since the product is about improving art viewing experience, black, white and light gray are used as main colors to reflect and symbolize art galleries.

Prototype and Usability Test

I created a quick prototype in Figma (Link: https://www.figma.com/proto/mCndxwV7CfiArHgKZbcHgF/Untitled?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=24%3A254&starting-point-node-id=24%3A254), and I found 3 random volunteers from work for the usability test. All of them are frequent visitors to galleries and museums. 

 

The scenario for the test is they are visiting the National museum of New York. They saw a beautiful sculpture in room 243 called “Sleeping Angel” and would like to know more about it. I wanted to find out: 

  1. Are the navigation and the UI of the design user-friendly enough for first time users to find the information they needed? 

  2. Do they feel satisfied after using the product? 

  3. How likely would they come back to the App in the future?   

 

The findings from the test showed patterns:

  • After giving the task, all 3 participants used “search” to look for the sculpture and were able to find the result very smoothly.  

  • They all think the categorized information made them feel less overwhelmed and more informative. 

  • All of them ignored the Home page daily artwork because it wasn’t related to the task, which makes me reconsider if it is necessary to add it on the Home page. 

  • None of them explored the “Museum” tab. They shared that they usually look at the screen from the top to the bottom so it wasn’t noticeable enough, and the light gray color made the icon even more unnoticeable. 

  • And because features on the bottom aren’t noticeable enough, 1 participant shared that she won’t use the “audio guide” feature because “most likely she won’t see it”. 

Concusion

I think GV’s Design Sprint is an efficient method to come up with a quick and functional solution to a problem. With this method, I was able to solve the problem of improving visior’s experience in viewing art by designing an interface that provides better visual hierarchy and information architecture. For the next step, I would consider reiterating the Home page from daily art delivery to something that will engage users more, such as latest exhibition or events information. 

bottom of page