How to make Culture great again ? — UX Case study
OVERVIEW
For our first project at Ironhack UX Bootcamp, we had to work on a global problematic in order to develop our skills in empathizing, defining, and ideating.
We were first grouped by four to work together, then we received our subject that we were going to work on for the following two weeks.
That’s how I started to work with three colleagues on the Art and the culture.
More specifically our subject was :
How might we help museums and other public institutions to bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?
As the subject was quite large, we already knew that it will cover a lot of people: those who enjoys going to a museum, those who don’t go quite often, even children.
Our mission was to find a way to bring people back to museums and exhibition. We had two weeks to find a realizable solution, and to show it with wireframes and eventually a prototype.
To do so we realize this project in three different steps : Empathize, to understand better the scope of the project and the user(s)’s thoughts and feelings. Define, to analyze our findings and get visibility on the user(s)’s profile and habits. And Ideate to find together achievable solution(s) and to make it real.
Scope & Constraints
Our scope was easy to understand : we had to go from our problematic (that I wrote above) to a solution explained with low-fi or mid-fi wireframes. And we had 10 days to make it happen !
A few challenges already appeared : We were working as a team of four, but nobody knew each other before to start the project. Also we didn’t have any budget to realize it of course. We could only count on us, and our teachers, always ready to guide us through this adventure !
But the biggest challenge for us was that it was our very first big project as UX designers ! We were all four of us beginners in this world, so it was not so easy to get confidence from the start.
Hopefully we worked very well as a team, as everyone was completing each other. In that way we were able to be more efficient every day, by learning and understanding how everyone was working.
Now let’s go deeper into how we create great wireframes, starting from nothing but a problematic !
Users & Audience
How to meet and understand our user ?
First of all in order to better understand for who we were working for, we started some research divided in two parts :
A secondary research allowed us to better understand the real situation of museums, galeries, and other art institution. How they are doing right now ?What is the trend of the past few years ? Who is going to the museum ? So many questions that we are now able to answer.
After that we completed our results with a primary research as we interviewed a few people. This allowed us first to validate or deny some hypothesis we had from our secondary research, but also to better understand who our user was, what is he doing when he goes to a museum, what he enjoys and hates about it.
We decided to conclude our research by putting everything we got together in an Affinity Diagram. It gave us better visibility on the situation, and from there we were able to decide on which topic we wanted to focus on.
How to define our user profile and journey ?
Now that our research was done, and that we decided where to focus our mind on, we were finally able to define more precisely who we were targeting.
To do so we worked on two phases : Who is our user ? And what does he do regarding Culture ?
That’s how we created “Emma”: An Art-lover in her 20–30’s who loves to learn everything that’s behind the Art : from the symbolism of a masterpiece, to the History of how a cultural movement was born.
We defined her goals, her motivations, her frustrations, even her behavior. Everything she was and felt regarding the Culture. This is basically the creation of our persona.
After we created our persona, we still had to define what she does when she goes to a museum. So we started to define her journey map of going to an exhibition.
From the planification of the visit, to the end when she shares her experience, we detailed everything she does. To complete her actions, we also explained how she felt every step of the way.
This journey map help us to detect design opportunities to help her enjoying better her journey.
That’s how we highlighted two pain points during her journey : the price of the exhibition which is too high, and the lack of information about the masterpiece she found during the exhibition. For this second pain point, we knew that a lack of information would make her feel frustrated as she is not able to understand all the little stories behind the art piece.
It is nice to be blowed away by a masterpiece, but it is even better to understand how it was created, why it was created, to understand better the context.
From this statement, we were finally able to define our problem statement :
Emma, a curious and dynamic culture addict who enjoys going to the museum
needs a way to have access to the context, the stories and the symbolism behind the art piece that she loves,
because getting knowledge is one of her essential needs in life, and she is losing interest and emotional intensity by undertaking too many steps that badly affect her need to become a better version of herself.
The ideation
Assemble the ideas
Now that we were able to define our persona, her journey, and our problem statement, the next step was to ideate in order to gather all our greatest and craziest ideas together.
To do so we decided to go through three round of crazy 8. The crazy 8 is an exercise where you have 8 minutes to draw 8 ideas that could be solution to our problem. The ideas can be completely crazy, the only goal is to think “out of the box” to try to solve our problem.
We came with common ideas as the creation of an application with information during an exhibition, or also with funny ideas as a parot on your shoulder who will answer all your question when you are visiting a museum. Actually that one will be the anchor of our final solution, but we didn’t know it yet.
After more than one hour of ideation we ended with a great final round that gather all of our best ideas to solve the problem statement and help “Emma”.
But the job wasn’t done ! We still had to make those ideas real. To do so we started to put all our greatest ideas on paper, and we brainstormed in order to find workable features from it, to add in an application.
An application is what suited the best for us, as you can use it anytime when you are not at home, within your mobile.
After we thought about many features, we tried to prioritize and to choose what we wanted to keep or not in our final application. However this exercise was too hard for us at this point, as we were so proud of what we achieved until then. We didn’t want anything to put in the trash, as we were convinced that everything was important !
Because we felt too attached to all our features at this point, we decided to keep going and to try to go through a natural selection later.
To organize a natural selection, we went backward to the journey map we created, and we started to build a user flow of our application, based on every step that “Emma” was going through during her visit.
For every step, we discussed if there was a pain point to solve at this step, and if yes if we wanted to put something in action to solve it, or if we juste wanted to let it go.
This operation ended very well, as even without noticing it, we selected just a few of our features, but we tried to go the deeper we could into the ones we selected. Our goal here was to provide “Emma” of the best application we could. We tried as much as we could to make it easy-to-use to her : just press a few buttons to obtain the information you want was very important to us as we felt it was the biggest pain point of all the journey.
Finally we were able to create a complete user flow, and our famous parot was the common thread of it : as a Tamagochi that you have to feed to make it evolve and grow, we decided to add an Avatar feature in our application, to make it like a game.
The gamification part was central and ideal, as we were convinced it will bring people back to museum, like playing a game (everybody know the success of “Pokemon Go”, imagine the “Pokemon Go” of Culture).
As we got deeper into that idea, here is some creations of one of my co-workers. She created some examples of future avatars to put into our application, based on real Art pieces. I hope you like it:
After we finished our user flow, we started to put it paper again by creating low-fi wiframes to be able to show something that people will be able to immerse in. Once our wireframes created, we tried to build a low-fi prototype with it by tinkering our papers. Here is the result :
Outcomes
The low-fi wireframes and the prototype were the final steps of our project (without counting its presentation to the class). We felt proud of what we accomplished in such a few days, and without almost any experience in UX. For a first project, we thought it was pretty great !
Unfortunately we were not completely satisfied, as for us this prototype was just a step in a biggest journey than just a little project ! We wanted to do more : to make mi-fi wireframes, to complete our user flow, to test on potential users, to come back at it after user tests to correct it and make it even better and better ! Maybe we will go deeper in this project later after the Bootcamp, who knows ?
I also got a few lessons from this project. The first one is the importance of teamwork and the cohesion within a group, especially in UX ! We were able to go forward in every step especially because our cohesion was great.
I also understand better now how every step of the journey, from the beginning of empathizing, until the creation of your prototype, is primordial to be able to end with a solution that fits the needs of the users. You can not skip any part of this process, because every part is depending on the other.
Finally, the best lesson I have learned is that if we had to do it again, I am pretty sure that we will end with something completely different and new. I guess that the important thing here is not the end of your journey, but the path you take to get to it.
I hope you enjoyed to read this. Thank you for reading me, and if you have any question, or if you want to give me feedbacks, I will be glad to read and answer to them in the comments.
