Raízes Museum

0. Setting

Problem

The Raízes Museum is located in Recife, Pernambuco. It specializes in hosting exhibitions that explore the lives of prominent artists and how those lives relate to their work. The museum faces challenges in producing educational materials about its exhibitions and in providing guided tours and audio guides for its visitors.

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Solution

Development of an app to help visitors have an educational and artistic experience at exhibitions.

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1. Mapping the user and their journey

Personas

First, two personas—Hudson and Roberta—were created to better understand the profile of the museum’s visitors.

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Journey Map and Storyboard

To gain a deeper understanding of Hudson’s persona, a journey map and an overview storyboard were created to understand his experience at the museum and identify potential touchpoints for the platform.

Their main challenges are difficulty understanding the artworks due to a lack of artistic knowledge and frustration with the lack of diversity in the types of educational materials available.

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2. Analyzing the competition

Competitive audit

To analyze similar solutions available on the market, a competitive audit of the following players—Rijksmuseum (direct competitor), Smartify (indirect competitor), and Daily Art (indirect competitor)—was conducted. Categories such as Accessibility, Functionality, User Flow, and Navigation were evaluated and ranked.

The summary of the findings and conclusions drawn from this analysis was included in a competitive audit report.

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3. Testing with users

Low-fidelity prototype

The first wireframes for the platform were then created to build a low-fidelity prototype to be used in a usability test.

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Usability test

The test was designed with the study’s main objectives in mind, along with the tasks and questions to be addressed.

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The key findings and observations from this round of testing were compiled into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet shows how easily or with what difficulty each participant navigated certain features and areas of the platform.

Thus, the three main conclusions drawn from the test were:

1. Visitors want to learn more about the artworks, the exhibition, and the museum.
2. Users need a clearer indication of where to find more information about the artist behind a work or exhibition.
3. Users would like to have access to the museum's past exhibitions.

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4. Refining interface design

Final screens

The wireframes served as the basis for creating the platform’s final screens. Changes were made based on feedback received in the previous phase, such as adding more information and actions (display period, share, and favorite) to the exhibition cards on the Home screen.

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5. Conclusion

Teachings

This project was a tremendous learning experience, as I completed it as part of Google’s UX Design course, which is an extremely comprehensive and complex program. During the course, I worked with various processes and frameworks I had never heard of before. It was also great to receive feedback from my classmates at every stage of the project.

I ended up completing two more practical projects as part of the course, but I decided to focus on this one because I considered it the most comprehensive and well-developed.