What is the opportunity?

At first glance, museums appear to be places everyone goes to look at art. But the best opportunities to disrupt and change an experience are when no one expects change. We want to create a tool that can change the way we experience a museum.

Our Users

You and I. And everyone else who desires to discover and rediscover museums time and time again. We held museum curators in mind as actors who could best utilize our tool, but ultimately we wanted to align our design with museum-goers. We wanted to see how museum-goers might play with our diorama, and how new ways of moving about a museum space in the miniature might translate to new ways of experiencing museums in real life.

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

What is a museum?
What is the nature of experience in a museum?
How do people remember and reflect on their experiences in a museum?
Who are museum users/stakeholders?
How are artifacts displayed in a museum?
What are the different layouts of a museum? How do they guide you?
What breaks the flow of the museum experience?
How do you control the User Flow of a museum experience?
What does it mean to wayfind in a museum?

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Methods for Discovery

To better understand concept of “'museum-going,” it's touchpoints, and users’ expectations/experiences, we conducted:

Ethnographic Walkthroughs to immerse ourselves in the real elements of a museum
Artifact Analyses understand what objects are interactable in a museum and how they make us feel
Guided Storytelling Analyses to discover what memories stick out from their museum experiences
Customer Journey Mapping to lay out the start-to-finish experience of going through the museum experience

Experience Mapping to get a deeper understanding of how it feels to walk through museums
Exemplar Collecting to know how other museums solve the same sorts of problems we are looking at
Lo-Fi prototying to test out three of our initial concepts
Hi-Fi prototyping to test our final, lean concept Hakim Setup
Flow State Worksheet creation to know how users get lost in the “flow” of their experience
User Testing to see if our lean prototype, Hakim Setup, really does what we want it to do

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Above is one of our team's Customer Journey Maps. This was inspired by our ethnography trip up to the Newfields Museum in Indianapolis, IN.

General Findings

A museum is not a place where we struggle to find our way around only to look at old art. Museums are places for active engagement. They are changing. Users vary and are complex.

Our most interesting opportunity is to develop a tool for museum curators. These professionals consider their users' emotions when they explore their exhibitions. Yet, their users can feel in-the-way, claustrophobic, or awkward seated by a painting. ‍

It is important for curators to take out the guesswork. Some art should feel intimate cloistered. Some should feel open enough for friends to gather and comment. The key is to know when is appropriate.

We must develop a tool to test how users feel when they move through museums. This tool should give curators the insight into how users expect to feel when moving through a museum.

At first glance this is just a chair. Not ornate. Not dignified. It has a sign taped to it. This chair became one the central inspirations behind our design.

A participant tests out a "walk through" of the museum setup with her fingers.

Final Design

We created a physical diorama of a museum room, we call Hakim Setup. Users are free to play with the miniature exhibition setup.

This includes: laser cut walls, tables, chairs, plants, and artwork. As a lean prototype, our diorama acts as a probe for user input. We want users to feel comfortable talking about their emotions in a complex space. We also want our users to feel free to engage in play.

To help understand user play and input we crated a worksheet to examine user flows. We created metrics to help analyse their flows while they show how they move through the exhibits. It is critical that the curators pay close attention to the way users feel and ask why they feel those emotions. These insights enable curators to generate bold arrangements aligned to their museum-goer expectations. ‍

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What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

What is a museum?
What is the nature of experience in a museum?
How do people remember and reflect on their experiences in a museum?
Who are museum users/stakeholders?
How are artifacts displayed in a museum?
What are the different layouts of a museum? How do they guide you?
What breaks the flow of the museum experience?
How do you control the User Flow of a museum experience?
What does it mean to wayfind in a museum?

Methods for Discovery

To better understand concept of “'museum-going,” it's touchpoints, and users’ expectations/experiences, we conducted:

Ethnographic Walkthroughs to immerse ourselves in the real elements of a museum
Artifact Analyses understand what objects are interactable in a museum and how they make us feel
Guided Storytelling Analyses to discover what memories stick out from their museum experienes
Customer Journey Mapping to lay out the start-to-finish experience of going through the museum experience
Experience Mapping to get a deeper understanding of how it feels to walk through museums
Exemplar Collecting to know how other museums solve the same sorts of problems we are looking at
Lo-Fi prototying to test out three of our initial concepts
Hi-Fi prototyping to test our final, lean concept Hakim Setup
Flow State Worksheet creation to know how users get lost in the “flow” of their experience
User Testing to see if our lean prototype, Hakim Setup, really does what we want it to do

General Findings

A museum is not a place where we struggle to find our way around only to look at old art. Museums are places for active engagement. They are changing. Users vary and are complex.

We must develop a tool to test how users feel when they move through museums. This tool should give curators the insight into how users expect to feel when moving through a museum.

Final Design

We created a physical diorama of a museum room, we call Hakim Setup. Users are free to play with the miniature exhibition setup.

Still Curious?

Below you will find detailed sections on the Context, Methods, Process, and Outcome of this design research.

Oh no!

Oops! This project is best displayed on a larger screen. To learn more, open this page on your laptop or PC. Or, click on the button below to view the PDF.

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Learn More Download PDF
‍

What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

What is a museum?
What is the nature of experience in a museum?
How do people remember and reflect on their experiences in a museum?
Who are museum users/stakeholders?
How are artifacts displayed in a museum?
What are the different layouts of a museum? How do they guide you?
What breaks the flow of the museum experience?
How do you control the User Flow of a museum experience?
What does it mean to wayfind in a museum?

Methods for Discovery

To better understand concept of “'museum-going,” it's touchpoints, and users’ expectations/experiences, we conducted:

Ethnographic Walkthroughs to immerse ourselves in the real elements of a museum
Artifact Analyses understand what objects are interactable in a museum and how they make us feel
Guided Storytelling Analyses to discover what memories stick out from their museum experienes
Customer Journey Mapping to lay out the start-to-finish experience of going through the museum experience
Experience Mapping to get a deeper understanding of how it feels to walk through museums
Exemplar Collecting to know how other museums solve the same sorts of problems we are looking at
Lo-Fi prototying to test out three of our initial concepts
Hi-Fi prototyping to test our final, lean concept Hakim Setup
Flow State Worksheet creation to know how users get lost in the “flow” of their experience
User Testing to see if our lean prototype, Hakim Setup, really does what we want it to do

General Findings

A museum is not a place where we struggle to find our way around only to look at old art. Museums are places for active engagement. They are changing. Users vary and are complex.

We must develop a tool to test how users feel when they move through museums. This tool should give curators the insight into how users expect to feel when moving through a museum.

Final Design

We created a physical diorama of a museum room, we call Hakim Setup. Users are free to play with the miniature exhibition setup.

Still Curious?

Below you will find detailed sections on the Context, Methods, Process, and Outcome of this design research.

What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

What is a museum?
What is the nature of experience in a museum?
How do people remember and reflect on their experiences in a museum?
Who are museum users/stakeholders?
How are artifacts displayed in a museum?
What are the different layouts of a museum? How do they guide you?
What breaks the flow of the museum experience?
How do you control the User Flow of a museum experience?
What does it mean to wayfind in a museum?

Methods for Discovery

To better understand concept of “'museum-going,” it's touchpoints, and users’ expectations/experiences, we conducted:

Ethnographic Walkthroughs to immerse ourselves in the real elements of a museum
Artifact Analyses understand what objects are interactable in a museum and how they make us feel
Guided Storytelling Analyses to discover what memories stick out from their museum experienes
Customer Journey Mapping to lay out the start-to-finish experience of going through the museum experience
Experience Mapping to get a deeper understanding of how it feels to walk through museums
Exemplar Collecting to know how other museums solve the same sorts of problems we are looking at
Lo-Fi prototying to test out three of our initial concepts
Hi-Fi prototyping to test our final, lean concept Hakim Setup
Flow State Worksheet creation to know how users get lost in the “flow” of their experience
User Testing to see if our lean prototype, Hakim Setup, really does what we want it to do

General Findings

A museum is not a place where we struggle to find our way around only to look at old art. Museums are places for active engagement. They are changing. Users vary and are complex.

We must develop a tool to test how users feel when they move through museums. This tool should give curators the insight into how users expect to feel when moving through a museum.

Final Design

We created a physical diorama of a museum room, we call Hakim Setup. Users are free to play with the miniature exhibition setup.

Still Curious?

Learn More Download PDF
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Design Brief + Research Questions

Research + INSIGHTs

Primary + Secondary Research

Museum Walkthrough + Ethnography

"Touch the bear's fur and see what will happen," welcomes the sign below, waiting to give visitors a bit of a scare.," reads the signage.

Everyone has visited museums before, but when was the last time you visited to intentionally examine the experience through the lens of a UX Researcher?

To put into question what it means to experience the flow of a museum, we performed Walkthroughs, Ethnographic Observations, as well as Exemplar Collection and Thematic Analysis from our own experience at local and international museums.
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What+Why: We wanted to get our bearings on our new design domain: museums. To best understand, we took an immersion approach via self-ethnography as we experienced the local, Bloomington museum.

Information Gathered: We took maps of the museum and siloed off different exhibits as experiences, documenting the flow from one to another. Actively, we took photos and annotated the interactions available by either their digital or physical affordances.

Information Analysis: After mapping out the museum flow and documenting exhibit artifact affordances, we reflected on where our expectations were met or where they were frustrated. We also focused on areas of interactions where we felt that the museum rewarded us with a sense of competency or frustrated this attribute. Other attributes we considered were autonomy, control,relatedness, self-actualization, security, fiscal reward, influence, bodily thriving, self-esteem, and pleasure.
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Key Insight+Impact: Satisfying museum-goer needs of autonomy, competence, and a feeling related to the content of the curation is critical in enveloping users in an imaginative, informative environment. We found that users want to feel a sense of relatedness to the content of exhibitions, as well as the autonomy granted from well-structured museum flow, without heavy-handed or forceful wayfinding signage. This made us very aware of how we perceive a museum as a space that has a “start” and an “end,” even when the content may feel disparate.

Exemplar Collection + Theme Analysis

What+Why: We gathered pictographic evidence of museums firsthand from the Newfields museum, (Indianapolis, IN) as well as a multitude of museums in Olso, Norway, and Berlin, Germany. Although we gained insights into user flows from our previous ethnographic walkthroughs, we wanted to see a multitude of other ways in which the concept of “museum” could come to mean.
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Information Gathered: All information is in the form of photography. This includes photos of museum artifacts, how museums directed wayfinding, how they displayed exhibits, how technology was incorporated, and any other interesting aspect which might be analyzed to reveal truths about the experience.
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Information Analysis: We collated over 75 photos of our various experiences and annotated them based on our individual understandings of the experience they represented. Then, we mixed and matched until we found connections between the exemplars and recognized common themes to use as primary insights for concept generation.
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Method’s Key Insight: By deriving insights from our exemplar collection, we determined that the themes reveals for us unique opportunities to pursue ideation and concept generation. These themes for ideation became: Wayfinding (e.g. how we approach an exhibit), Invitation (how artifacts prompt our actions to behave a particular way), and Social Spaces (how space can change the way we act around one another).

Design Synthesis + Evaluation

Persona Generation

Research indicated our primary opportunity is to focus on wayfinding and social factors.
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Synthesis Summary:To iterate our concepts, we first needed to slim down our scope. We decided on methods to create a common grammar for our team. Towards this end we created personas, which align us to the expectations and frustrations of a variety of end users.
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We created a customer journey map to constrain our user journey. This map exhibited a flow of step-wise decision-making. It began with the consumer thought of visiting a museum to the end experience of why a user may consider to return.

Yet, we were not satisfied with mapping the business experience as a customer. So we dug deeper. We wanted to gain a higher level perspective on the museum experience. But the industry standard for mapping depends on linear progressions. Our map was going to put into question our experience of time, space, emotion, and composition. We needed a new kind of experience map.
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The insights from our new experience mapping convinced us to pivot back around to an early exemplar. It was a chair with a sign on it that invited us to take a seat in front of a painting at the Newfields Museum.
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It was strange to us. It broke apart our composition of the trip. It disrupted our flow. It seemed cheap and out-of-place. Whats more, no one was sitting in it. No one would sit in any of them placed throughout the rest of the exhibit, as we observed later. But why?

This everyday artifact gave us an explosion of creativity. We explored the affordances chairs provide us and how they change in the context of a museum. After throwing out all the functionality of the chair experience, we prototyped.
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Three lo-fi prototypes later and we had a hi-fidelity, laser cut diorama. This lean solution allows museum curators to try out their exhibition arrangements. They can ask users about how they wish to view art, and see if they are getting the curation right. After all, a museum is more than art. It is a place to walk, rest, socialize, contemplate, and more.

What+Why: We made three personas to align our assumptions of museum-goers. Through our personas, we can always check to make sure we are serving the users that represent our client.
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Information Gathered: We had access to storytelling interviews from 38 researchers. Each interview consisted of sticky-noting the train of thought of our interviewees. Each interviewee spun stories about how they felt about museums in their memories.
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Information Analysis: We took a variety of conflicting users stories. We did this for two reasons. 1) It was to account for the underrepresented groups (like elderly). 2) We had a large pool of data, so we should pull from that including our own.
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Then, we coded the stories to see where users experienced one of four things. We wanted to know how their past experiences led to their future goals with museum-going. Then, we wanted to see what factors either frustrated or satisfied those goals.
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Key Insight+Impact: Our approach widened our user group instead of narrowing it. This was not our initial intend. Yet, we ran with it and decided that a design space that can be more universal, and design for all would be our goal. This led our initial concepting to be more simple, clear, and to communicate to a broader range of users.

Customer Journey Map

What+Why: We looked at the data from our museum ethnographies, as well as other teams. Compiling all the data helped us create an "average" user customer flow. Although some data conflicted, we found that the museum experience was another spectacle. You arrive, pay at a reception, interact with the activities, then then leave. We now had a grasp on the total experience.
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Information Gathered: We consolidated various affinity diagrams from ours, and other team ethnographies.
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Information Analysis: We picked out a linear progression of the customer journey. This included the service aspects of the museum. Think about reception, guidebooks, and the trickets in the gift shop, as well as the exhibitions.
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Key Insight+Impact: We divided the customer experience into three large categories: "deciding to travel," "exploring the museum," and "reflect and return." These categories breakdown into particular interactions. At each touchpoint, we focused on the breakdowns and solutions a user could experience. We wanted to focus on the opportunities for solutions when exploring the actual museum.

Experience Map (Experimental)

What + Why: We created something complex and simple. We pulled inspiration from the philosophy of John Dewey. One topic he explored in the early 20th century is that of time and repetitive work. Through this, he surmised experience is a factor of our emotions, space/time, and composition.
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Emotions and space/time are intuitive. Composition is not. It is the story line we imagine when we look forward to an experience. We perceive a start, middle, and end of an experience.
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The composition of our experience changes in real-time as we move in space and time. For instance, we sometimes feel time seems to stand still when disengaged, or that time flies when having fun. When we take time to reflect on our experience, during the experience, our emotions also play a role.
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None of these factor (emotions, space/time, or composition) are independent. They come together to create an impression of our experience. It is not a question of, "Do these factors overlap?"

No. It is, "When these psychological factors overlap, what can they tell us about experience in this space?"

Information Gathered: Similar to our exemplar collection and thematic analysis, we used photo-ethnography alongside our notes to guide us as we reflected on our experience at Newfields.

Information Analysis: We needed working definitions of Dewey’s four threads of experience. For our purposes, we define sensual as relating to the pre-reflective sensory input in a situation. The emotional is the reflective feelings that a situation imbues in us as it relates to our expectations. The compositional is the journey we have in our minds about how an experience should start, play out, and end. And the spatio-temporal is how space and time is perceived to slow down or speed up, expand or contract, as we are immersed within, and taken out of our flow of experience.

We then generated visualizations of how each of these four experience threads shapes and interacts with our perceptions of the others. You check them out in the lightbox to the right.
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Key Insight + Impact: Our new mapping pushed us to take a step back. Browsing a museum is not like browsing an online collection with a search engine. Sometimes we are anxious when we move through exhibits. Sometimes it is too crowded. Worst of all, sometimes things pull us out of our experience altogether. We found that above all unexpected artifacts broke our flow. In our case, it was informal placements of viewing chairs.

Prototyping

Lo-Fi
What+Why: After our experience mapping exercise, we circled back to a museum artifact that disrupted our flow of experience. It was a simple chair in front of a painting and hanging a simple sign on the back, “Take a Seat.” And yet, no one in the museum would sit it in. Why?
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How: We explored the affordances chairs provide us and how they change in the context of a museum. After throwing out all the functionality of the chair experience, we prototyped.

We prototyped three experiences: Viewing Height, Museum Signage, as well as Exhibition Viewing Space.
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We wanted to know which of these experiences would provide the biggest impact as well as be modular to meet the demands of an ever-changing museum.
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Key Insight + Impact: We found our participants more feel they “get in the way” when other participants were present. They want to be respectful of the viewing space, but want to get what they came to see. We realized that users act quiet, will try not to sit or stand in the way of others as a way to show respect.

But the user experiences discomfort to show that respect to others, when they wish to sit or talk louder. We decided to make a miniature space where users to act out these situations. We could find out how they feel, where they might want to go, as well as their presumptions about spaces.
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Hi-Fi
What+Why: The insights from our lo-fi prototyping inspired our final design, a diorama we call Hakim Setup. This is a tool for internal museum design teams. Museum curators can engage users in hands-on play. User can generate new experiences, by participating in exhibition arrangements.

Material Construction: We took quarter-inch plywood and laser cut a diorama box and chairs designed in Illustrator. We assembled them alongside miniature prints of famous paintings. We also made moveable partitions, greenery, and side tables. These were all made from popscicles and beads, as well as two tables of similar construction.

Key Insight + Impact: We discovered through our research, museum-goes get immersed in museums. Museum-goers wish to be respectful to all others. At times, they deny themselves rest and noisy conversation to respect others. Yet, these acts of respect can take away from their own experience.
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Our design is a tool for re-arranging current exhibitions. It asks users why they think museums arrange exhibits certain ways. It opens up the role of seating, which goes often overlooked. Ultimately, it gives users a voice in how they would like for a museum to feel. Be sure to check out the section on the Design Outcome for more information on Hakim Setup.

User Testing

Hakim Setup is a modular diorama. We can arrange walls, paintings, chairs, tables and art to give spaces a different feel. We decided to test a less conventional arrangement to inspire creative reasoning in our users. Our goal was to see what sort of reactions our user may have to the "museum." and what sort of objects may interrupt her flow.

‍We started with some probing questions: Why do you enjoy art museums?Who would you usually go with? Why?What types of things are you looking for in a museum going experience?
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Next we had our participant evaluate our previously defined criteria from 1-5 (Likert Scale).
Our team performed this as well, and then compared the two. (This is a side-by side comparison. It aligns the internal design teams' museum layout aesthetic to the user's expectations.)
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Evaluation is based on sub-points in these categories:
‍Viewing Position
Comfort
Control
Feedback
Immersion
Social Interaction
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Finally, we asked our participant to engage in a co design exercise and interact and move the pieces as they see fit.
‍We prompted the participant that they could:
Start from our current positioning
Start from a blank room
Move any of the art, chairs, and other furniture
Speak out loud about why they are doing each thing
For insights on the outcomes of our evaluation, check out the section on the Design Outcome.

Outcomes + Deliverables Overall Process Flow Context + Metrics for Success

Process Flow

Design outcome

Outcomes

Final Design for Internal Use in Museums.

Hakim Setup‍

What+Why: Our insights focused on the user's feelings when the flow of their experience stops. At times this is due to a physical disruption, like a chair sitting in an awkward way, or crowds of people. Other times, we disengage from the experience for psychological reasons. When it does not go as planned, we must reflect and readjust. When we do so, this seeds the opportunity for ill feelings or a bad impression to cover the entire journey. ‍

How it Works: We made Hakim Setup to counteract the moments that pull us away from our museum experience. Curators can now probe, test, and generate new exhibits. They use art and furniture, even walls, to influence the flow of the experience. In miniature, the diorama facilitates users by acting as a proxy. They can speak aloud their feelings without the pressure to behave in a muted way. (The way we often feel when we walk through a quiet museum.)

Aligning with User Expectations

We use Hakim Setup to test and confirm innovative museum arrangements. But we can do more. We can target different aspects of users' needs as they move through their museum journey.

We can generalize a target user’s experience needs.

‍How: We refine our flow worksheet to align with the user experience. Our flow worksheet assesses user perception on 6 factors: ‍‍

Viewing Position
Comfort
Control
Feedback
Immersion
Social Interaction

‍How it helps designers & museum curators: We learn how different users expect to feel on their idealized museum journey. For instance, we can learn that one user group perceives a high level of comfort as integral to a good experience. another group may think that a high rating of social interaction is ideal. ‍

Developing Patterns of Analysis: Hakim Setup is a scalable tool. The more user testing sessions we collect, the more patterns of preferences we can make.
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For Example: If we had 100 older, male users, and 100, younger female users, we could find what factors influence their experience most. We can learn the likelihood that either user group would visit the museum, and how frequent. Then, we can install exhibitions that lean towards those user preferences. This is only one example, and simplified at that. In theory, we could use this method to quantify user preference and best serve the museum's clients.

Standardize User Evaluations

Analysis Procedure

This is the procedure for analyzing the results of the Flow Worksheet. This is a proof of concept for the data analysis of a large set of user tests. If a museum team wished to test a variety of users, they could analyze by finding the standard deviation. Then, see how user groups differ in their perception of the flow of the museum experience. After, use Hakim Setup to try new arrangements and create new flows that align with the target users. ‍

1) Ask users to fill out the Flow Worksheet after they take part in the user test.‍

2) Each category (Viewing Position, Comfort, etc.) questions the user to get a sense of the user's experience. Average score of every category.‍

3) Perform a quantitative analysis. For each of the 6 categories, find the standard deviation. You should have 6 separate sets of data. Where do particular demographics fall? Ask yourself who your target users are. Is there any one category that has more clear preference than another? Is there a category where the bell curve is very wide and varied, with an unclear data set? The Flow Worksheet becomes a tool to bring out empirical insights about user perceptions.

Overall Process Flow Methods Used Context + Metrics for Success

Hakim Setup

A Doll-House Diorama to Build Better Museum Experiences

Expertise

Platforms

Deliverables

More?

What is the opportunity?

Our Users

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

‍

Methods for Discovery

‍

General Findings

Final Design

‍

What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

Methods for Discovery

General Findings

Final Design

Still Curious?

Oh no!

What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

Methods for Discovery

General Findings

Final Design

Still Curious?

What is the opportunity?

Research Questions

Below are the high-level research questions we tried to answer to understand and direct our design/solutions:

Methods for Discovery

General Findings

Final Design

Still Curious?

Project Photos

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Tell me more about...

Design Brief + Research Questions

Contextualization

A semester-long class project designed such that we push our skills beyond designing for screens and develop a knowledge over a complex domain: museums.

Metrics of Success

The Design Brief

Length of Project: 16 weeks

Research Questions

Research + INSIGHTs

Primary + Secondary Research

Museum Walkthrough + Ethnography

Exemplar Collection + Theme Analysis

Design Synthesis + Evaluation

Persona Generation

Customer Journey Map

Experience Map (Experimental)

Prototyping

User Testing

Process Flow

Process Flow

When methods were employed, and why.

1

2

Collect Existing Knowledge

Why?

Generate Concepts

Test Array of Concepts

3

Familiarize & Diversify

4

Build & Evaluate Design

Expand What Could Be

Why?

Prototype and Test

Why?

Construct, Fortify, Challenge

Why?

Design outcome

Outcomes

Final Design for Internal Use in Museums.