1 — WICKED PROBLEM: CULTURE AND HERITAGE
Finally, the boot camp begins!
For this first one project of this 9 weeks challenge, we have to practice what we learned previously during the bootcamp (especially design thinking). The goal is to focus on isolating, researching, and understanding a more precise, granular, and specific problem.
Yep, even if I deeply want to practice UI, I just have to be patient and not jump any steps 😉
During this first challenge, we have to work with a team on wicked problems as a design challenge. I was with Léo, Kévin, Diana and Elsa and we had to choose to work between 5 different themes: we agreed to work on “Culture and heritage”.
“Since the 70s, museums and other public institutions have been suffering a profound crisis.
In the heart of this kind of institution, there’s the mission of making heritage accessible for all. They build the bridges between objects and people,
for them to be enjoyed by citizens. “How Might We help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and revive public cultural heritage institutions in the 21st century?
Alright, here’s the pitch. So what is our goal here? Where do we start?
The first step of design thinking is… *drum roll*
🥁
EMPATHIZE
First step: User researches!
In order to collect lots of information about the users regarding this subject, we have to use qualitative and quantitative methods.
Qualitative methods are about interviewing users instead of quantitative methods which are surveys.
Lean survey canvas
To collect quantitative data, we begin by gathering all of our information in a Lean Survey Canvas to help us to create a survey with useful questions. “What is that?” It’s a methodology created to help us to gather our knowledge and all of our 2ndary research in specific cases.
Quantitatives Researches // SURVEY
Based on this previous tool, we created a survey (thanks to google form) with 11 questions covering demographics to more specific ones (kind of museum, budget etc). The goal is to have more information to understand the user: their needs, motivations… But moreover: the pain points!
From our 113 answers, we can be able to gather a lot of data.
113 people (who lost their time for a good cause 👏) answered the survey, with following results :
87% are frustrated about crowds in the museums
55% of users go to a museum between 1 to 3 times per year
69% of users spend less than 25€ per month
66% of users are between 25 and 34 years old
Qualitative methods // INTERVIEW
After this quantitative method, we focus on the qualitative one, which is an interview with one person.
To complete our research and know more about our user’s habits and taste, we conducted interviews of 30–45mn with five users
— Luckily we were five on our team, so we split together to conduct them 😊 —
We asked them for motivation: “What usually motivates you to go visit an exhibition?” ; style of museum they prefered: “What kind of museum do you usually visit?” and moreover potential issues: “What could prevent you from going to a museum?”
•“I’m interested by everything, all styles of museums. I don’t have preferences as long as I get to learn.” — Lorène, 28 y.o
•“The crowd! The lines really spoil the fun.” — Liliane, 58 y.o
•“Museum or exhibition are a way to escape.” Hugo, 29 y.o
•“For something very unique, I could be afford to pay expensive price!” Vincent, 30 y.o
Thanks to all of these answers, we begin to have more insights.
But we have to dig deep inside to understand WHY?
DEFINE
2. Problem Statement
To synthesize all of our findings, we use An Affinity Diagram:
An Affinity diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groups.
As you can see just above, we gather our insights in different groups and we can see that some categories are more important than others 😉(Frustrations, motivations, feelings…)
Most of our users are frustrated about crowds in museums.
We learn that users go to the museum between 1–3 times /year.
Insight about money spent is that our users spend less than 25€ per month
Our main user targets are between 25 to 34 years old.
With all of these insights, we could learn different things which lead us to different How Might We (HMW) statements:
“HMW keep the public interested during the pandemic?”
“HMW try to give back the best memories for visitors?”
“HMW make the visitor not feel alone ?”
How Might We statement is an exercice from design thinking which will allow to transform an issue into an opportunity. The point is to make as HMW statement as possible and after that, each person of the team will vote with a dot circle on the most relevant.
3. Users & Audience
EMPATHY MAP
As the title says, the point of this tool is to reach a huge lvl of empathy to understand the needs and frustrations of a user by synthesizing the thoughts, the words, the feelings, the actions… of a user.
😡 PAIN POINTS
• From the Affinity diagram we learned that 86,7% are frustrated about the crowds in the museums. And that they were frustrated by arriving at the museums and experiencing long queues.
☺️ GAIN POINT
• Discovering new things makes them enthusiastic.
• They want to satisfy curiosity.
💪 GOALS
• Giving them some interactions with paintings.
• They need to be stimulated by something.
Thanks to all of this gathered informations, we are being able to create our first user persona 🤩
A user persona isn’t a real person! It’s a fictional character created by combining qualitatives and quantitatives data. An user persona is a combination of several users in one, which must include relevant informations and quotes from real users.
WHY making a user persona:
The persona summarizes all the researches to remind us the user.
So, let me introduce you to our history lover, Emily Adams! 🤓
She is 30 years old and lives in Paris. She enjoys museums, especially the historic ones, but she hates waiting too much in the queue. Also, she likes reading books like biographies. Indeed, the main paint points we found out in the interviews is that 86,7% are frustrated about the crowd in the museums.
Her goal is to maintain her cultural knowledge during this pandemic by discovering new things to do and to keep informed about exhibits.
To empathize even more with Emily, we created a user journey map.
A user journey map is a visual representation of the customer experience — it is used to map out the current journey a typical user might take to reach their goal.
Scenario // The Emily’s journey begins when she notices an advertising in metro. Curious by nature, Emily grabs her phone to search some information and purchase two tickets at the Orsay museum to visit it the same afternoon with a friend. She arrives and waits for 30mn in rain, because of people queuing. When she enter, she barely can’t see the paintings because of the crowd. She visits the museum for 2–3 hours with her habits like listening to her favorite playlist and podcast. She finishes the visit and goes out to meet some friends in a bar and talks about her experience. She would have loved to see more of this exhibit and she feels that needs more informations to satisfy her curiosity.
Emily’s journey is divided in severals steps:
1️⃣ Before visiting:
She goes to a book shop to purchase some history books. After that, she grabs a coffee with her friend who told her about the new Van Gogh exhibition. Emily checks information on the website and buys tickets online.
2️⃣ Arriving at the museum:
Emily goes to the museum under the rain and she didn’t expect to see so many people here. She has no choice but waits in the queue. She passes the security check and the ticket verification before purchasing an audio guide.
3️⃣ During the exhibition:
She enters the exhibition and sees the first artwork. She admires the paintings and will enjoy her time by taking some pictures and listening to her audio guide but there are too many people inside. She takes a seat to rest for a bit.
4️⃣ After the visit:
She makes a short stop at a museum shop to buy some books before getting out. She shares her feelings with her friend about the exhibit and thinking about one specific painting. After that, she watches Netflix and looks for a documentary on a similar subject.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Then, based on her frustrations and opportunities we found a problem statement ( concise description of an issue):
“Museum and public institutions need to find a way to facilitate the experience while keeping the visitors entertained and more engaged at all stages of the exhibition because waiting in the queue and the crowd can be overwhelming.”
Our problem statement allowed us to generate many “How Might We” (remember: it’s use to transform a problem into an opportunity)
After debriefing, we tried to think about different opportunities:
1️⃣ Before:
•“optimize the ticket booking app”
•“display visitor’s affluence”.
2️⃣ When Arriving at the museum:
•“In order to avoid the frustration of the waiting time in the queue, it could be interesting to create games, activities, quizz and/or documentation related to the museum and the exhibition.”
•“create an infrastructure to protect the waiting visitors from the rain.”
3️⃣ During the visit :
•“Create interactions via the museum experience app”
•“Gamification and quizz to increase interactions”
•“Augmented Reality”
4️⃣ After the visit :
•“How Might We make her see the missing paintings on the exhibition (because of the crowd)?”
•“buy books at the end of the exhibition”
•“scan a QR Code to save information about the paintings”
•“Virtual Reality version of the exhibition to visualize the art pieces without the crowds.”
The Feedback after the visit would be to:
•“Create a Virtual Reality representation of the exhibit with full scenography”
•“One opportunity or challenge for museum is to continue customer experience after his physical visit”
•“Allows the visitors to vote on the app, or participate to quiz to win rewards (like discount on the future visit?…)”
IDEATION
The next step is the ideation part! Every member of the team made some sketches, came out with different ideas, and then we put it all together.
I thought about adding a game part. The user can either choose:
•A quiz with different lvl of difficulty (easy — medium — hard) and questions adapted to it, with clues or not according to your lvl choice. The user can have a score and compete with friends.
(After debriefing ideas with everyone, I had another one — thanks to Léo who talks about having a mascot.)
I thought about a customized mascot: having the “base” and choosing clothes or items to personalize it — like in this amazing game “Ultimate chicken horse”
(If you don’t know it, I would recommend you to buy it, it’s cheap and hilarious!)
This kind of anecdote makes us understand how important it is to exchange with others, “be creative” and not limit ourselves!
- A game inside the exhibition!
The idea was to use augmented reality, scanning paintings or around them to achieve objectives and find some details. The user can scan the museum’s interior to find a painting reference, or capture “things” (as “pokemon go”)!
Each achieved goal will unlock a trophy (just as video games) and the user will have a page with his advance. The point is to create a bigger interaction with the paintings and/or the place by discovering and searching deeper.
Elsa though about having a very cool quiz that will fit according to the estimated time in the queue to keep the visitor entertained.
Léo thought about having the app as a mascotte which will accompany the user everywhere (maybe a physical mascotte for children) and could share favorites crush on paintings, exhibits with others via some hashtags.
Kevin thought about quizz with augmented reality with differents lvl and scan some paintings to find details etc. At the end, the quiz will propose to the user to learn more by differents medias, books, articles. The user could share his experience on severals platforms and social medias (IG, FB…)
Diana was thinking about augmented reality in a different and very interesting way: scanning a painting and your mobile will play music adapted to it, or audio special information not mentioned on the exhibition, like some secrets!
We put them together and decide what should be the best to keep.
Before jumping to the low-fi prototype, we created an user flow:
User flow is the path taken by a prototypical user on a website or app to complete a task. The user flow takes them from their entry point through a set of steps towards a successful outcome and final action, such as purchasing a product.
We first thought about the entire app, but we decided to focus on the biggest pain point which is the waiting time: so we provided the quizz feature.
Then once our userflow is ready, it’s now time to….
🥁🥁🥁 *drums rolls again*
…
PROTOTYPE
We use lo-fi wireframes to construct the steps of our future prototype.
1️⃣ Our History lover Emily arrives in front of the museum and notices that even with buying a ticket the wait is going to be long, she decides to take the quiz that she noticed earlier while booking.
2️⃣ Choose your level of Difficulty // We wanted to be inclusive since our audience is broad. The activities should please our history lover as well as engage with a younger audience that might not be interested by the artwork.
Emily chose expert level because she knows a lot of stuff with her history background.
3️⃣ The context // Inside or outside the museum.
Inside: Make the wait more educational
Outside: Make the exhibit more interactive and memorable
4️⃣ Sample screen from a quiz //
5️⃣ Sample screen during the exhibition // Augmented Reality related to treasure hunt
6️⃣ Feedback page : links to other medias, social link but also ladderboard to compare your performance
Last but not least, we ideate about the next steps:
- HI-FI PROTOTYPE FOR TESTING SESSION
- DEVELOP OTHERS IMMERSIVE FEATURES: (Other games using augmented reality/ Immersive experience using virtual reality..)
- GET A PERSONALIZED VISITING DASHBOARD (Ideal visit time to avoid crowds/ Historic and favs)
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FEATURES
- SUBSCRIPTION PREMIUM SERVICES
- GET A QUOTATION FOR APP DEVELOPMENT
- ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN
To conclude
This project was really challenging, it was great to work with a team on this kind of subjects! It is very interesting to work together, listen each point of view and ideate on different things, without knowing each other deeply!
All ideas and knowledge together made this low-fi prototype for this first week! 💪
Not time to rest, we already started a new project…
…TO BE CONTINUED…