User Reaserch

The purpose of the study is to conduct qualitative user research in order to provide insights to create a prototype to augment the experiment of visiting an art museum in a digital format. Our app, Path, leads users to virtually access art museums and finds their art tastes. Our main users love the art museum and are people who visited it frequently before Covid-19. Users who have been reluctant to go to the art museum due to some distractions can also be our targets. People who are not familiar with the art museum can access the museum more easily and cheaply using the app.

We focused on people’s previous experiences physically walking through art museums to understand what made the experience enjoyable as well as what could be improved. By understanding this at a base level, it allows us to move forward to understand how we can make the best augmented interactive space of an art museum. We tested five total participants with a range of experiences when it came to visiting art museums in order to gain insights on how this experience was for them before the pandemic changed how we viewed going out to visit physical spaces.View Research Report

Prioritization

My team and I created statements and arranged them on a scale of high user need to low user need. Beginning with the lower user need, we had most of the How Might We’s that included promoting return user visits, encouraging users to support museums, as well as providing filters for museum costs, including souvenirs, memberships, and tickets. We placed these lower on the scale because while these things were mentioned by participants, it was a small part of the experience, usually in the beginning and end of the map. Most participants were willing to return because of their own interest in the museum in the first place, and because of this, wanted to support museums, and would find the opportunity to buy souvenirs or tickets because of this motivation. Moving up the scale to higher user needs, we focused more on the interactions that participants mentioned. We wondered How Might We provide optional interactions with other visitors and staff, present information in a non-intrusive manner, and ultimately, at the top of our scale, placed How Might We create an experience that is self led. This is placed at the top with the highest user need because considering the shape of the experience, the research insights that the participants we interviewed provided, the main part of visiting the museum was for participants to be on their own, being able to walk around and look at art, and even if it was on a curated path, it was one that the participant took on their own.

We placed them on a 2x2 graph that represented our original scale of high to low user need but added another axis of high feasibility to low feasibility. We placed all of our statements using our original scale while moving them horizontally according to how well we thought the How Might We be represented in ability to be completed. The one with the lowest feasibility was encouraging users to support museums- it was something that wasn’t necessarily guaranteed even if we did motivate users, they still had their own choice on if they wanted to or not. Our How Might We’s for promoting return visits and providing optional interactions were a bit higher feasibility, though both of these were something that included a lot of other variables, such as their own motivations for wanting to return, in which it was likely if they were already someone who loved art, as well as interacting with others, in which it really depended on the museum if they had questions or there were people they wanted to interact with. Our next highest feasibility was How Might We create an experience that is self led, which was our highest user need and we felt could be something that could be easily represented but was something that needed to be considered in detail in order to be representative of each individual user. The two How Might We’s that we considered the highest feasibility ultimately seemed like statements that could be solved in a solution that was fairly easy. Presenting information in a non-intrusive manner was as simple as providing data in a way the user could just choose to look at it or not. Providing filters for museum costs was a feature for singular aspects of the museum visit, but not all of it. These two statements were also lower on our user need scale. This led to the choosing of the How Might We statement at the top of our user need scale- to create an experience that is self led. We, as a team, felt this encompassed the main goal of the museum visit, and had a high enough feasibility that we felt was something that could be accomplished while finding interesting solutions to achieve it.View HMW (How Might We) Statement

User Testing 1 - 1

We decided to go with the risky assumption instead of the goal-based design because we wanted to make sure that the quiz inside of the app was designed well- as it is the most important factor of getting the digital app experience correct, as well as answering to our How Might We statement. For our prototype quiz, we decided to construct a Google Form in which we tested different art based on general categories such as medium, represented as paintings, digital, sculpture, and ceramics, art movements, such as Baroque, Abstract, Surrealism, and Modern, and subjects, such as people, places, objects, or conceptual. We provided the participant with two options to choose from and did not provide any information based on the art, only provided a visual representation and asked them to choose whichever one appealed to them better. We had a total of six questions, as we didn’t want to overwhelm the participant with options. We asked questions before the participant began, in which we asked them of their expectations of what a quiz asking about their art preferences would look like, and how many questions and time they expect it to take them. During the quiz, we asked the participant to utilize Think Aloud Protocol while deciding so that we could gather information about why they were making the choices they did as they went through each piece of art. After the quiz, we asked the participants if they felt the quiz was successful in asking about everything representative of their art preference. We asked if there was anything missing, or if they felt it didn’t accurately ask them questions that were indicative of their preference. We also asked if the art could be represented in any other way to better their experience and understanding viewing it.Try Art Museum Quiz