MUSEARCH
The product:
Musearch, a mobile app designed to teach its users about art history while also being a tool to buy tickets for your favorite museums.
Project Role:
UX designer and UX researcher
Project duration:
Start: August 2022
End: October 2022
The Problem
After the pandemic, once-promising attendance figures at museums have plummeted. The economic impact on cultural venues has been tremendous and it might take some time to recover previous numbers.
Research
Many cultural organizations suffered staggering attendance losses in 2020 due to the pandemic.And as they began to reopen again, entities next faced concerns about “getting back to normal” – “normal” often meaning our 2019 attendance and operating conditions. For better or worse, one thing that’s become clear is that there may in fact be a new normal, wherein conditions may be less durable than before the pandemic.
After reopening in 2020 and throughout 2021, cultural institutions largely had deferred demand. Deferred demand takes place when people can visit but choose not to. After organizations reopened their doors and created availability (thus satisfying pent-up demand), the remaining demand was largely a function of deferred intentions.
Reassuringly, market potential projections continue to suggest that cultural entities will slowly continue their recoveries. However, this market potential may be lost if entities take recovery efforts for granted and fail to recognize that competition for leisure time is projected to be particularly fierce in 2023. “If we build it, they will come” remains untrue – and may be even more the case next year if engagement, marketing, education, and programming efforts are not continually prioritized.
Users profile
Younger people were still the most likely to engage with art/heritage activities online, with 81% of 16-24 year olds doing any activity in the last year, compared to 36% for those 65 and older (cf. 57% overall).
Families were also more likely to have engaged online (71%).
Attendance among families is particularly high (97%), and especially for families with children up to 10 years old.
The Goal
The goal of this app is to make an art mobile app accessible to everyone. Through the research, we identify that young people and people with families (especially children up to 10 years old) are very engaged in arts and heritage and are a key audience for our design choices.
The bases of the app are to incentivize the various arts learning and to integrate all museums and venues into an-in-one place to easily buy tickets for the venues you want to visit. This will modernize the ticket-buying system in anticipation of the return of visitors to museums globally. This app also has the intent to market the museums and new exhibitions, offer
Persona
41,São Paulo, Brazil
Business owner
“Seeing my kids learn while having fun is such an enjoyable experience”
Roberto is a small retail business owner who is seeking to grow his store while maintaining the quality he built over the years. To do that, he often enlists himself in online courses for business, creativity, and leadership. He also tries to inspire his kids by taking them to local museums and expositions on the weekends. An enjoyable and interactive experience for himself and his kids to learn more about art would make things easier. He notices that the use of technology helps attract his kid's attention and they are more engaged that way. So a mobile app that helps be fun and interactive would incentivize his kids even further towards learning.
Goals
Grow his newly established business while maintaining quality and efficiency.
Raise the kids as best as he can and have quality time with his family.
Frustrations
Waiting in lines while going out with his family.
Overcomplicated educational apps and courses.
Information locked behind paywalls.
Ideation
storyboard closeup.pdfstoryboard big picture.pdf
Low Fidelity Prototype
Usability Study
Usability studies findings
The museum listings and filters don't help you easily select a venue, an insight is: users need better cues and filters to help them easily select a venue they want to go to.
The use of the homepage isn’t helpful or lacks essential information, an insight is: users need a clean but informative interface when they first arrive on the app.
Viewing and editing their profiles was easy and intuitive, an insight is: to transfer and apply the same methods to other features like the search function and menu navigation.
Most users are not comfortable with the way the navigation is currently set up, an insight is to design as a way to customize or view information based on their preferences or likings.
Mockups and changes
The new homepage was redesign to be simpler. Instead of showing all the info on artists and paintings and the main page, you now require to go to another tab
The paintings screen on the low-fi version had some changes on the high-fi version. The position of the buttons and a more simplified look, addition of features such as “like” and the painting location were also added. The new version also has a navigation bar on the bottom instead of the "hamburger" icon on top.
High Fidelity Prototype
The high-fi prototype offers a closer look of how the app will perform and work as a finished product
View the Musearch high fidelity prototype here
Takeaways
Impact:
"I feel like this app considered every user that it could reach and tried it’s best to accommodate the necessity of these users. Overall the navigation and flow is smooth and I love how it looks.”
What I learned:
Education apps are tricky and it always seems that you can add more and more functions to help develop and broaden the content. But at some point, you have to let the user decide how they want to navigate or explore your product, and make alterations or add features based on their experiences and needs.