Designing a Virtual Museum App

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For this project I worked in a pair to answer a brief set by The Studio for Curatorial Discourse - Berlin, to:

"Support museums to digitise their exhibitions, giving visitors the opportunity to access exhibition content regardless of location and opening hours."

The brief was open and required UX research to identify and define what direction the solution would take.

A screenshot of our Research

Alongside interviews, we carried out desk research, where we were able to identify competitors (or at least potential competitors at this point), check what museums and galleries are currently offering, worldwide and comparing it to what is offered in Berlin.

The research uncovered a few issues that confirmed our assumptions which can be summed up in the following statement:

Users already have access to a lot of museum and gallery content online, for free, and therefore wouldn't be interested to pay for a digital platform/product

The Solution: "Museums, Live."

The idea we came up with was to design a platform that gave museums, galleries and exhibitions the option to host live guided tours on top of the usual content of VR, AR and panoramic galleries. 

The user would only pay for special live tours (of their choice) but would have free access to all the museum and galleries uploaded virtual content.  Having all of the museums and galleries' content on one platform was important for users and would add value by unifying navigation and search features thereby reducing user friction.  The content has room for growth and follows the conventions of a streaming platform, but for Art and Museums! 

During the pandemic this could be a crucial source of income for many smaller and medium-sized museums in Berlin, and this idea could be maintained past 'lockdown' to be offered outside normal business hours or 'after hours'.  This also means that anyone with internet access could be a potential user and the platform could grow a global audience.

The desktop user flow shows our persona browsing the content and being notified of a live event that is starting soon. This highlights the interactivity of the platform. The mobile user flow shows the user interacting with a VR exhibition - making use of her VR goggles.

Mood Board

The brand attributes were tested with a mood board to ensure the colours and art direction were legible, and in line with our intentions, before designing the hi-fidelity prototype

Style Guide

We considered the scalability of the platform and designed 'artStream' logos for other cities outside Berlin and thought about how the categories and navigation would change as the content grew.

We also considered the Artist's perspective and some of the next steps of the project could include an Artist's network or community page and Events calendar.

​Thanks for reading!