Overview

An audio tour app to help visitors find and explore unique exhibitions of the National Gallery's collection.
National Gallery of Art is a mobile app designed to help visitors explore the National Gallery's collection, exhibitions, and Sculpture Garden with audio tours, stories, and more!  I conducted a case study on the current experience that reimagines the experience to address some existing pain points. On the National Gallery of Art Redesign, the primary interface features is the interactive map and self-guided audio tour features of exhibitions.
My role
UX Designer, UX Researcher - Individual Project (Google UX Design Certificate)
Methods
Surveys, Competitive Audit, User Interviews, Personas, User Stories, Wireframing, Prototyping
Design Toolkit
Pencil & Paper, Photoshop, InDesign, Miro, Figma
Duration
July 2022 - August 2022
gOAL
    Redesign an app for the National Gallery of Art that allows users to easily navigate the museum and enjoy tours.
    Design Challenge
    How might we help visitors discover unique self-guided audio tours?
    Problem
    Visitor struggles to find exhibits and navigate the museum due to the lack of accessibility.
    Solution
    National Gallery of Art: A audio tour app that helps visitors find and explore unique exhibitions of the National Gallery's collection.  

    Browse engaging multimedia content

    • The home screen showcases tours in order to provide a central place for a visitor to go when starting their visitor journey.
    • Visitors can start tours, view the interactive map, and look up events to enjoy the experience with other visitors.
    • Visitors can find the museum Information that provides official, updated, and information regarding hours, events, and accessibility.

    [Accessibility] Support multiple languages, Audio Transcripts, and Accessible Tours

    • Introduced a feature to Support multiple languages. Washington, DC is home to a great number of visitors all over the world whose primary language is not English. Therefore, the visitors should be able to select a language they are most comfortable with.
    • Allowing the visitors to select an audio transcript for better flexibility and accessibility.
    • Visitors are offered verbal description audio tours and American Sign Language video tours.

    Starting a self-guided tour

    • Clicking on a tour will allow them to view the tour’s description, and location, as well as utilize the search to find exactly what they are looking for.
    • Look it up features allows visitors to enter the stop number, select "go", and press the play button when the stop appears.
    • Search & Find tours and museum Information

    dESIGN Process
    How did I actually get there?
    Understanding of Current Interface Experience

    Before diving into ideating the new experience, I took some time to understand the user goal and pain points of the existing interface.

    User Research
    Interviews revealed 3 pain points in visitors’ journeys

    I conducted 5 interviews with users who had visited the museum in the past or who would like to visit in the future to understand their needs and frustrations. Through a synthesis, I was able to create a typical journey map of a visitor's experience and extracted visitors' 3 main pain points while visiting.

    Design Opportunities
    How could I translate these pain points into design opportunities?
    Competitive Analysis
    Existing products addressed some of the pain points, but no one product did it all. 

    I took a deep dive into what services our competitors were providing, and how we can integrate features onto our own app.

    Sketches  
    Building and improving new pages based on the National Gallery of Art's current experience 

    When creating my sketches, I tried to consider National Gallery of Art's current experience for starting tours, and improve them when applying it. In the initial sketches of National Gallery of Art's new home screen I decided to go with full page bleed image that would take up the screen and reveal a select tour button. I later realized that this solution doesn’t allow users to easily navigate between options. To address this issue, I incorporated section that reveals multiple tours to choose from when visitors reach the home screen.

    Wireframes | lOW FIDELITY DESIGN
    Visitors can discover tours to improve their visitor experience

    The sketches prepped me to begin creating wireframes on Figma and gave me a better visual of the overall application.

    BEFORE & AFTER | hIGH FIDELITY dESIGN
    New Experience
    I have combined all the elements shown throughout the design process to create a warm, functional, fun, and approachable app.
    National Gallery of Art App wants to provide engaging multimedia content and self-guided audio tours for visitors.
    The Final Screens

    Final Product

    Reflection
    Lesson Learned + What I'd do differently next time.

    Designing a user-friendly app that solves real problems was fulfilling, and I'm thankful for the comprehensive UX process training. I found it rewarding as it addresses ongoing user needs. To enhance the app, I would introduce a camera feature for artwork identification and further improve interaction in the museum's map. This project expanded my skills in design systems, UX research, and UI design.

    Thank you for reading!

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