Artiful Mobile app
Artiful is an audio guide app for museums and art galleries. Anyone who visits a museum can download Artiful on their mobile devices before they begin a gallery tour. Artiful allows visitors to scan an artwork and play its audio guide on the spot.
My Role:
UX Designer
Responsibilities:
Conduct user research
Develop wireframes & prototypes
Conduct usability testings
Product Duration: 5 months
Project Type: Individual project
Research
Background
Before I kicked off the project, I asked myself: what kind of perspectives and experience do I want to know? As I reflected my personal experience, I became curious how others experience art museums, especially with audio guide devices.
Interview
At the beginning, I sent out surveys to find the right participants that meet the following criteria:
visit museums at least twice a year and
have used audio guide device at least once.
After interviewing participants, I have identified 3 problems:
Time-consuming to find more information about artworks and artists they are interested in.
Uncomfortable to use audio guide devices shared by unknown numbers of visitors
Easy to forget what they have seen and heard at the museums
Understand the Users
Throughout the surveys and interviews with participants, I developed personas of potential users. Based on the research process, I decided to target students and young professionals.
Building a persona & user journey was a significant process to organize a list of pain points and decide what design solutions to build:
Persona Development
I created 2 personas to represent two types of the target population: students and young professionals.
Reframe Design Question
Building personas helped to identify problems in my target users’ museum experience. Then I created my final design question, using “How Might We” (HMW) statement: How might we help students and young professionals have a meaningful learning experience at art museums?
Ideate
Design question helped me to start ideating the solution’s interface and key features. I chose to build a mobile application so that users can have access to audio guide and desired artwork/artist information at anywhere, even after they leave the art museums.
Key Features
This is a quick summary of the important features of the audio guide app:
Artist biography page - users can read artist’s biography
Artwork info page - users can get an access to a brief info about artwork
Audio guide page with transcript - users can read the transcript along.
Audio guide playlist - users can listen to audio guide and view exhibition in order
Scan feature - users can take a picture of artwork
Save feature - users can save favorite artworks
Key User Flow
This is the user flow of finding an audio guide of an artwork. This experience would benefit users who want to learn about interesting artworks efficiently.
Product Structure
The key features and user flow were useful to create the application’s overall structure
Design
Paper Wireframes
In this paper wireframe, I wanted to make the audio guide experience quick and easy. This simple paper wireframe shows how a user can quickly scan an artwork to listen to its audio guide.
Also, there are a few other ways users can experience the audio guide:
Users can tap “Scan“ at the bottom navigation bar immediately.
Or, they can select a museum location and find an audio guide from playlists or find the artwork they want to listen to the audio guide.
Transfer to Digital Wireframes
The following low-fidelity wireframes shows two key features: scan an artwork and save an artwork and/or artist. Scanning feature allows museum visitors to find desired information about the artworks they are interested in faster. Using the saving feature, the visitors can save the pages of artwork and/or artist so that they can go back to the information at anytime whenever they want to.
Usability Study
The 1st usability study was done on the low-fidelity prototype. This process helped me to redesign the low-fidelity wireframes.
Round 1 findings:
Users want to see how many numbers of information they can access.
Users want more intuitive “Save” icon.
Users want to multitask while they use the app.
Refining the Design (1st Study)
After first usability study, I noticed that most of the challenges that participants struggled with was to save an artwork and artist. For easier experience to save information, I replaced the bookmark button to heart button, which many people use to express what they like on social media.
The 2nd usability study was done on a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockup needed refining
Round 2 findings:
Users want to see specific location of the artworks.
Users want clearer message of “View more” page that leads them to the artwork page.
Users want to see more intuitive audio playlist button to play
Refining the Design (2nd Study)
The second usability showed frustration with finding artwork page to save. To clarify the page, I changed the language from “View more” to “View Artwork”.
Final Design Mockups
Takeaways & What I Learned
The app makes users feel happy with the easy access to audio guides as they can get more resources and save information they like. One of the peers said:
“I love how the app is easy to read. I like how it has more than audio guides of artworks, and it even provides rich content that I can access to at anytime… Also, I really think the saving feature is helpful to remember what I’ve seen.”
While designing Artiful app, I learned that gathering and sorting peers’ feedback are important part of the design process because analyzing the peers’ suggestions is critical to what design solution to provide. Usability studies and peer feedback influenced each iteration of the app’s designs.
Potential Next Steps:
Reiterate the design process: conduct another round of usability study to validate the Artiful’s effectiveness to solve pain points and modify the design based on the study.
2. Research and ideate how to improve accessibility of the application for potential users with special needs.
3. Consider potential scalability of the Artiful app.