Artiful Mobile App
Artiful is an audio guide app for museums and art galleries. Anyone who visits a museum can download Artiful on their mobile devices before they begin a gallery tour. Artiful allows visitors to scan an artwork and play its audio guide on the spot.
My role & responsibilities:
UX Designer
Conduct user research
Develop wireframes & prototypes
Conduct usability testings
Project duration:
Oct 2021- Feb 2022
The Problems
At the beginning, I sent out surveys to find the right participants who 1) visit museums at least twice a year and 2) have used audio guide device at least once. Having conducted the interviews, the followings are key problems:
Time-consuming to find more information about artworks & artists they’re interested in
Uncomfortable to use audio guide devices shared by unknown numbers of visitors
Easy to forget what they have seen & heard at the museums
Understand the users
Throughout the surveys and interviews with participants, I developed a persona & user journey of potential users. Building a persona & user journey was a significant process to organize a list of pain points and decide what design solutions to build.
User Persona
“I want to keep memories of my experiences, which I can go back to at anytime.”
Bio: Ian is a software engineer, who recently moved to Washington D.C. with his partner and golden retriever. Recently, he and his partner have been looking for new date ideas, and they found out there are lots of museums and art galleries to go to. When they visit art galleries, Ian wants to keep the memories of what he has seen and heard. However, he noticed that has a hard time remembering the experiences after leaving the galleries.
User Journey
Paper Wireframes
In this paper wireframe, I wanted to make the audio guide experience quick and easy. This simple paper wireframe shows how a user can quickly scan an artwork to listen to its audio guide.
Also, there are a few other ways users can experience the audio guide:
Users can tap “Scan“ at the bottom navigation bar immediately.
Or, they can select a museum location and find an audio guide from playlists or find the artwork they want to listen to the audio guide.
Transfer to Digital Wireframes
The following low-fidelity wireframes shows two key features: scan an artwork and save an artwork and/or artist. Scanning feature allows museum visitors to find desired information about the artworks they are interested in faster. Using the saving feature, the visitors can save the pages of artwork and/or artist so that they can go back to the information at anytime whenever they want to.
Usability study: findings
I conducted 2 rounds of usability study. Findings from the first study helped me to redesign the low-fidelity wireframes to mockups.
The second study used a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockup needed refining.
Round 1 findings:
Users want to see how many numbers of information they can access.
Users want more intuitive “Save” icon.
Users want to multitask while they use the app.
Round 2 findings:
Users want to see specific location of the artworks.
Users want clearer message of “View more” page that leads them to the artwork page.
Users want to see more intuitive audio playlist button to play
Refining the Design
After first usability study, I noticed that most of the challenges that participants struggled with was to save an artwork and artist. For easier experience to save information, I replaced the bookmark button to heart button, which many people use to express what they like on social media.
The second usability showed frustration with finding artwork page to save. To clarify the page, I changed the language from “View more” to “View Artwork”.
Accessibility Considerations
Provide multiple languages options.
2. Highlight transcript parts of the audio as audio guide plays for users to read along easier.
3. Provide access to users who are vision impaired through voiceover to narrate the app’s information.
Takeaways & What I Learned
The app makes users feel happy with the easy access to audio guides as they can get more resources and save information they like.
One quote from peer feedback:
“I love how the app is easy to read. I like how it has more than audio guides of artworks, and it even provides rich content that I can access to at anytime… Also, I really think the saving feature is helpful to remember what I’ve seen.”
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While designing Artiful app, I learned that gathering and sorting peers’ feedback are important part of the design process because analyzing the peers’ suggestions is critical to what design solution to provide. Usability studies and peer feedback influenced each iteration of the app’s designs.
What would be the next steps?
Improve the high-fidelity prototype and conduct another round of usability study to validate whether the pain points users experienced have been effectively addressed
2. Conduct more user research to determine any new areas of need.
Consider potential scalability of the Artiful app.