In order to understand the users I’m designing for, I conducted interviews and created empathy maps. The primary user group I found through this research were those who did not have the time or means to visit museums.
For people who were actually interested in art and have visited art museums before, they mentioned pain points such as not having enough time to visit the museum or being unable to finish seeing all they wanted to see at the museum. For others that were less interested in art, they did not have enough motivation to physically visit the museum in the first place.
Elliot is a busy novelist who needs an app that can provide an immersive and efficient virtual tour experience of art museums since they don’t have the time to visit museums further from home.
Mapping out Elliot’s user journey showed the benefits of creating a virtual tour app for an art museum.
Along with the user research, I also completed a competitive analysis with the goal to compare the experience of each competitor's app that provides a virtual experience of art galleries. I researched direct competitors like ArtPassport and indirect competitors such as Google Arts & Culture and Smartify. I learned from what they did well and what could have been improved in their apps.
I drafted a couple iterations of the home page before putting together elements that I thought worked best together. After that, I drew out the other major screens.
I then created digital wireframes while iterating on the ideas I had in the sketches. I decided on adding a favorites and notifications feature in my first draft of wireframes.
I completed the low-fidelity prototype with the frames from the digital wireframe.
I conducted a usability study to test the low-fidelity prototype and fix any issues before I went ahead with the high-fidelity version.
Several possible areas of improvement were found through this usability study.
The menu bar in an app should hold the most important and relevant features of the app, but users found that some features in the prototype seemed unnecessary in the menu bar.
Users suggested the search feature to be placed somewhere more conspicuous.
Users want more interesting features in the app beyond the virtual tours.
I iterated on the low-fidelity prototype according to the findings from the usability study and created mockups with the new design. Unnecessary features were removed and more useful ones were added or modified. I also changed the frame to be longer since I realized the previous frame was too short unlike most smartphones today.
This is the resulting high-fidelity prototype.
Here are some of the major features in the virtual tour app for a mock art museum.
Exhibit
Artwork
Favorites
Community
I learned a lot while working on this since it was my first UX project. It was interesting and fun learning how to use Figma and bringing my design ideas to life. At first, it was a struggle to figure out what my app should even look like, especially since the prompt I chose did not have a lot of examples to take inspiration from, but once I had an idea, it was easier to build upon it.
I was ambitious with my ideas in making interesting features, but realized during the process that those features often weren't what the users need or want. In order to design with users in mind, I have to think less about what I think would be cool to have in the app and more what the users need or expect from the app. I realized just how important iteration and usability studies were in the process of design and the fact that your design is never really completed—your design can always be improved.
Additionally, I learned that accessibility considerations should not be an afterthought, but rather something that should be kept in mind throughout the design process. For example, I made sure to use icons to make navigating easier but also had text describing what the icon was, options for long pieces of text to be read aloud, and always used colors that contrasted well with each other.
Finally, I learned that designing takes more than one person and it made me look forward to projects that would include teamwork. Much of the iterations on the app’s design resulted from usability studies and peer feedback, which shed light on how the design could be improved.
If I were to continue working on this project, I would conduct further usability testing on the app, identify areas of improvement, and continue iterating on the design for a better version.
