Reimagining the museum experience through
interactive technology.
I was part of a small design team that designed a web-based mobile application to gamify exhibits. We designed a scavenger-hunt style game that would make finding and learning about historical exhibits more engaging and interactive.
In 2023, the Edmonds Historical Museum began considering ways that it could improve and utilize technology to enhance the visitor experience. Arnie Lund, a vice president of the museum, asked our team for help creating design concepts that would revitalize the museum using technology.
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Research
Wireframes
Onboarding
Prototypes
Oct - Dec 2023
Figma
To understand the needs of our stakeholders, we held a meeting with Mr. Lund to discuss the state of the Edmonds Museum. We learned about the museum’s importance, who we were designing for, and about various areas Mr. Lund felt the museum needed to improve in. After our interview, our team analyzed notes we had taken to identify common themes that were important to focus on.
Our analysis helped us divide notes into important groups, which allowed us to understand what was most important to the Edmonds Museum.
Each member of the team then conducted field research to gain insight into how museum visitors interacted with exhibits. I took a trip to the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum in Seattle to observe how people behaved in a fairly generic museum setting. I then analyzed my notes to derive key findings from them.
Before we began ideating as a team, each team member chose a focus group based on data from our observations and the stakeholder meeting to analyze further. We would then each create a proto-persona to make understanding our findings easier and more personal. I chose to design a persona for a fictional 6th grader named Levi, which gave our team insight into how a younger audience might feel about the Edmonds Museum currently.
Using my persona as a reference, I sketched a set of ideas for new features that would enhance the museum experience. My ideas ranged from sound-enhanced displays to interactive scavenger hunt maps. Much of my ideation focused on turning the museum into an interactive and fun learning opportunity.
Our research indicated that phones were already a common piece of tech that visitors used in museum spaces. This made them
an available and familiar asset for us to implement into our solution.
With this in mind, and by analyzing 40+ sketches and ideas as a team, we chose to create a mobile-friendly application that could
turn museum exhibits into an interactive "scavenger hunt".
We created an infographic detailing our findings and intended design goals for a presentation. To give the graphic some personality, we designed it with a Peanuts theme, fitting a joke that we had nicknamed our team after.
I was in charge of developing wireframes for a home screen, an onboarding screen and a prize screen. My goal was to include all relevant details on each page. Since users would access this app in mobile browsers, they might not expect to have to click through multiple screens initially, so I wanted onboarding to be immediate especially.
My team developed a style guide that could be applied to our wireframes. We decided to pursue a colorful and playful style to bring energy and life to the historical museum. I developed reusable components in Figma, such as icons and buttons, which we used in our styling and throughout the design as well.
A first set of prototypes was developed by applying styling to our wireframes. We then reviewed each others' mockups and suggested changes, which led to a complete prototype that was ready for testing.
We tested an early prototype with about 20 users, documenting their processes, thoughts and frustrations. This revealed various areas for improvement:
As a team, we analyzed feedback from the prototypes and worked together to optimize our designs. I worked closely with a teammate named Lars, who was in charge of designing the scavenger hunt game, to draft a new onboarding process that focused on simple text and easy-to-read screens. He created a sketch that we used as a basis for a new design, which proved quite effective.
Our final product was a scavenger hunt style mobile game that would make the museum experience engaging for users. We created an interactive prototype with Figma to demonstrate our design. Museum visitors would be able to access the app via a link or QR code, and could play a game where they responded to trivia questions by finding the corresponding exhibit and scanning it. The app also featured prizes, an online gallery, and more.
You can try our interactive prototype using the Figma window below, or click here to open it in a new tab!
When we presented our design and concept to stakeholders from the Edmonds Historical Museum, they were full of questions and ideas. As we explored those questions and ideas together, it became clear to me that our design had gotten the Museum's representatives thinking about how this concept could be applied and maintained. While it has not developed beyond our prototype as of yet, our design concept showed the Museum's stakeholders that giving exhibits an online presence could not only be used for games like our scavenger hunt, but that it could make future ideas and developments easy to implement as well.
Working on this project not only gave me valuable experience working with design tools and creating mobile assets, it also taught me valuable lessons about working as a team. Partway throughout the project, one of our teammates had to take a leave due to a personal problem, which left gaps in our planning. I got chances to both step up and lead the team in addressing these gaps, as well as chances to take initiative and offer to take extra responsibility where I could. This experience helped me learn to adapt to problems and be a stronger team member by working to support others when they need it.
This project did not continue past the last prototyping phase, but if we were to continue with it, I would personally like to focus on refining some of the later additions to the design. Our stakeholders commented on the exhibit gallery feature specifically, saying that they thought it had much more potential by adding more content than just descriptions, such as audio or imagery. I would love to explore some new ways to bring exhibits in the museum to life in this way. Once a design was refined and tested, developing it would require each exhibit that would be included in the scavenger hunt game to have an ID assigned to it in an online database, allowing them to be read by software to identify what someone scanned in response to a question.
