GO LOUVRE | A Personalized Museum Guide
Application Design | Sept. 2018 - Dec. 2018
Team: Yiding Adam Liu, Fangyu Cui, Nan Jiang
Skill: literature review, user research, competitor analysis, UX/UI Design, prototyping
Introduction
GO Louvre is a mobile guiding app for the Louvre Museum. Based on literature reviews and in-depth interviews with visitors, we found that visitors of the Louvre suffered from the overwhelming amount of artworks, the complicated museum space, the bulky hand-held guiding devices and the generic visiting routes. Therefore, we designed the app to provide an automatic and personalized museum guiding. After visitors select their interested items, the app generates a visiting route accordingly. The app provides guiding with both 2D and 3D map navigation. Visitors can enjoy the automatic audio and textual illustration of the items. After the visit, the app generates a personalized trip record for visitors to memorize and share their route.
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Background
The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world with 8.1 million visitors in 2017 and more than 40,000 visitors at peak days. Louvre ranks the 1st out of the top 20 museum visited globally, according to “Global Attractions Attendance Report_the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) and the Economics practice at AECOM. “
However, there were also complaints on the Louvre for its overwhelming amounts of items and maze-like exhibition space. Most dissatisfaction results from the guidance and commentary. The current guiding equipment was criticized to be bulky, confusing and unpleasant. Moreover, plenty of visitors come to the Louvre with no aware of what to visit apart from the four manifestations.
In this case, it is required that a new visiting experience with efficient guidance and vivid commentary. We proposed a mobile application that assists visitors to understand and explore the exhibition space of the Louvre, meanwhile, to pursue an enriched visiting experience according to unique preferences of the users.
Research
Literature Review Results
We find that most dissatisfaction falls in ineffective guidance, followed by the lack of company and unsuccessful viewing experience. Among the visitors, only 31% are domestic ones while 69% are foreigners, who are generally less familiar with the Louvre and might have trouble reading the French illustrations. The four discontent factors are approximately equal, including illustration, signage, waiting time and crowd.
We perceive the findings as an opportunity to develop a mobile guidance App, which provides personalized, seamless and highly interactive guidance through the Louvre.
Interview Results
We interviewed four tourists who had visited the Louvre in the past five years. Their interest in art range from casual tourist to art enthusiast.
Visitors would like to be provided with suggestions to visit, meanwhile they have a wish on personalized experience.
Visitors need tools to manage their visit. Awareness of the time left for certain routes will improve the visiting experience.
Visitors have high demand for locating and commentary. Route and commentary should be the easiest functions to access.
The commentary should include audio and text. Some visitors might prefer either one of them.
Visitors prefer information in hierarchy with explicit layout, and overwhelming information should be avoided.
The guiding app serves as an assistance in appreciating artworks. It should require minimal interaction movements to meet essential demands.
Competitor Analysis
We analyze the performance of four competitors in four functional aspects about route, guidance, service and sharing. The results serve as an efficient reference in our own design. Through competitor analysis, we learn several common solutions in museum guide Apps, such as the adoption of various routes, and textual and audio illustration with images. Moreover, we confirm the feasibility of several technologies, such as spontaneous GPS guide and AI recognition.
Persona
Based on the interview, we create one primary persona, who collects the most typical and common pain points, and a secondary persona, who summarizes the needs of specialists in fine art, such as researchers and students.
Our design strategy is to firstly propose a minimal viable product, meeting the needs of the primary persona. With the secondary persona, we envision more potentials in fine art studies, such as facilitating the archiving and notes taking process.
Ideation
Brainstorm
As the problems are defined, we brainstorm as many ideas as possible and classify them into five clusters by making the affinity diagram shown above. After rounds of discussion on their novelty, feasibility and priority, we confirm that the primary objective is to design a personalized museum guide, which allows customization of the visiting route and provides spontaneous illustration during the visit. Several interesting points are also adopted as subordinate features, such as generation of a collage presenting the visited artworks.
Storyboard
We make a storyboard to visualize the narrative of our envisioned user experience. A user selects his target artworks, visits them according to the automatically generated route, enjoys the seamless commentary, makes adjustment to the route, and review the visited items after the trip. The storyboard helps us design the main body of the product.
Sketch UI
We make sketch UI according to the storyboard. In this process, we quickly explore the wireframe of the product, depict and evaluate all the UI pages as well as the interplay among them. We also explore interactions in detail such as ‘switching between the “2D map mode” and “3D navigation mode”’, ‘scan the artwork for illustration’, ‘export my journey map’, and etc.
Prototype and Test
Low-fi UI
Based on the previous ideation, we designed a Low-fidelity version of the product, covering the main pages, including, ‘artwork selection"‘, ‘map‘, ‘route adjustment‘, ‘illustration’, ‘‘personal journey export’. We made an interactive prototype to conduct usability tests for further improvement.
Usability Test
We conducted usability tests on five participants, each of whom was assigned four tasks, including ‘plan your visit‘,‘change your route‘,‘get the artwork details‘,‘finish and review‘. The results shows four problems of the item selection page, including ‘complicated items in the selection page‘, ‘lack of information for a confident selection‘ , ‘unawareness of the item locations‘, ‘confusion and inconvenience to switch between maps and items‘. Moreover, the 5th participant stated that he was unaware of the progress and item locations during the visit.
High-fi UI
In the high-fidelity version, we adjusted the design based on the usability test results. We simplified the item selection page and presented the items according to their popularity. Before starting the visit, we design a confirmation page to show the route and item locations simultaneously on the map. In the navigation pages, we provided the progress information and thumbnails of the items on the map.
Final Design
In the final design, we polished the graphic style of the UI. The components are designed as simplified as possible, such as transparent fill of the buttons, to ensure full attention to the map and items to appreciate. We added transitional animation effects between pages and among UI components to ensure a seamless interaction experience.