100% of survey respondents look at individual museum websites to find current exhibitions. Right now, visiting museum websites one at a time is the only way to browse what’s on view. Museum Map consolidates information, giving museum-goers one place to discover exhibitions in any city.
Both locals and tourists are making the decision on what museum to visit based on location and exhibitions on view. To gather this information, users must use multiple tools: a map and individual museum websites. This is time-consuming for museum-goers and doesn’t always allow for discovery of new exhibits.
Museum Map consolidates exhibition information to help users locate museums and discover exhibitions that interest them. To further aid in decision-making, users can search by city and filter by museum type, exhibition type, and days open. Exhibition photos are featured for each museum - easily accessible with one click on the map.
Museum Map is my Design apprenticeship capstone project. I led the project from start to finish with 1:1 mentor guidance and feedback from fellow museum-goers. Following a competitive analysis that showed an opportunity for Museum Map, I used a user survey to help prioritize features.
User personas served as the foundation for user stories: Katherine is pursuing a PhD in art history and wants a product that helps her save time for her frequent museum visits, Cody is a local museum-goer that wants to use the map to find interesting exhibitions nearby, and Ayfia usually visits museums when she travels – she wants to discover exhibitions in neighborhoods she’ll be visiting. User flows reflect priority tasks identified through research.
I began the visual design process by sketching ideas for the web app. I took inspiration from Google maps – currently one of the most useful tools for museum-goers to gather museum information and a format that most are familiar navigating. Next, I used high-fidelity wireframes to confirm user understanding of filters in the Museum Map interface with click tests and interviews.
I conducted additional rounds of user testing and gathered more feedback in the mockup stage. I also implemented a styleguide for Museum Map, using both color and original icons to help users identify museum types; the logo and typeface were kept simple to emphasize content.
Main updates made based on feedback were adding filters for exhibition type, editing hover-state colors for readability, and making sure main museum links read as clickable. The biggest surprise for me was users’ preference for a map with more saturated color than I originally went with.
The final step in this project was using Flinto to create a clickable prototype. For a future iteration of this project I would like to add a list view, a suggestion I received while gathering feedback.
Museum Map gives museum-goers one place to discover exhibitions in any city. Users will save time browsing exhibitions and will potentially discover museums and exhibits they would not normally have found otherwise. The interface’s simplicity puts the focus on information users most often use when deciding what museum to visit: location and exhibitions on view.
