Private View - a new digital experience
 

The Brief: Create a digital platform for the British Museum which helps enhance the museum experience for its visitors, and a campaign to help launch the platform. 

This project was inspired by an article on itsnicethat.com, in which Chris Michaels, Head of Digital and Publishing at the British Museum, was quoted as saying "the distribution of people through our space is inevitably very uneven, and we can do a huge amount more with mobile in particular to get people to every nook and cranny of our 90+ galleries." 
http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/british-museum

 

I immediately began thinking of an app that combined smart building data with personalized reccomendations, to create truly personalized tours that maximized each person's experience with the British Museum. My first step was the research if this already existed, and if not, what did already exist. I found that there was no official British Museum app, only a handful of third-party apps. 

At this point, I began doing more serious research into the British Museum and their current offerings, including several days in the museum itself, taking an audio tour, touring with various guidebooks, and trying to get a feel for what would be most useful. 

I also researched other museums who are renowned for their digital offerings, and sketched out a basic flow of what was available in each of their apps. 

Using the annual reports from the British Museum to find the statistical breakdown of visitors to the museum, I then created 6 personas who fit into the age/sex/nationality statistics. I used the Falk types to give each of my personas a reason for visiting a museum, making sure to have one of each, and then filled out the personas and the empathy maps to try and bring each of them closer to a real user, while still maintaining an accurate cross-section of average British Museum visitors. 

Using my research into the museum, other apps, and users, I began sketching out what the scope of the app would be, and then a basic layout of where various features would be within the app. 

Using my chart as a basic reference, I created user journeys for each persona. 

Taking into account the steps in my user journeys and my organizational chart, I created an inital process flow for the entire app. 

Wireframes
A round of paper prototyping with sketched wireframes so that I could test it with people. I scanned these sketches into popapp.in, and sent the prototype to 12 people for user testing, making an effort to stay as close as possible to my personas. 
https://popapp.in/w/projects/556355cbae63d6b06a64d4f5/preview/556355db086955232755e7d8
 

 

At this point, I realized I wasn't having the results that I wanted from the design, so I spoke to my tutor, who helped me uncover some of the issues I was having so that I could work to fix them. At the bottom is the version that I decided to proceed with as my visual identity for the app. 

The design carried across all the screens for the app prototype, using a white background on the text-based screens for greater legibility, and the pages were all loaded into an Invision prototype.

The museum would display a large digital map in the Great Court area, which would receive the same real-time building data as the app, and be able to display to all visitors where the busiest and quietest areas of the building were at any given time. 

The app would be launched on both the British Museum website and the Apple App Store, and promoted across the Museum's social media accounts.