The first step of this project was to find digital virtual museums on the web and compare them with my idea of virtual museum. There are different types of virtual museums but I have identified two good examples similar in style and quality: the UMA and the Raphael Virtual Museum. After carefull review, I identified these main takeaways:
-Both the museums offer a virtual visit that does not give the freedom to move as the user want. The user cannot navigate in any directions but just on specific locations.
-Both the museums use 360 images to look around.
-The paintings in both museums can be clicked and information is provided in fullscreen, ruining the experience of visiting.
To start off, I conducted a survey with 30 people between friends and my Linkedin network. I chose specific users that love art and museums. Here is a breakdown:
Would you visit a virtual museum instead of a real museum?
90% of respondents are 25-44 years old
98% of respondents usually go to museums
75% of respondents visited before COVID19 at least 3 times a year a museum
- To understand the main pain points of the user
- Understand if any of the features are relevant to the pain points
I conducted several user interviews on users’ experiences visiting digital museums or museums in general. I identified a few user trends from the affinity map. As a result, I chose to focus mostly on trends I could influence directly using the desktop version of the virtual museum.
Among the trends identified, I decided to focus on the one identified in the Navigation group.
After synthesizing the user research, I created a persona to refer back to while designing the virtual museum. He represents the potential users of the Darteq Museum.
I came up with new design principles when designing the digital virtual museum:
Simplicity is key - the focus of the digital museum is to allow the user to be immersed in the museum visit experience, in the simplest way possible.
Seamless Feel - the experience of visiting the digital museum should complement the use of resources that are already in the museum (to enhance)
Intuitive - Every aspect of visiting the museum will support the users’ way of learning easily, as it follows typical and known conventions. Visual language should also be welcoming and accessible.
This was the most challenging project I have done as the design needed to be translated for a Virtual digital experience. Most of the steps I took, I needed to think in 3D.
I decided to integrate the onboarding directly into the experience through an info panel that provides a description of the museum and navigation instructions, keeping in mind that users don't like to go through extra screens to get started.
Unmoderated User Testing
I installed Hotjar on the museum web page and was able to analyze the behavior of some visitors during their virtual museum visit. This allowed me to understand which parts of the museum needed to be removed or modified before publishing the final version.
Eye Tracking
Thanks to some volunteers, I performed an "Eye Tracking" Analysis. The goal of the analysis was to capture real physiological data about user conscious and unconscious experiences. It was interesting for me to see how the users experienced the virtual environment. Some users were familiar with a 3d digital reconstruction but some others had some problems navigating.
There are different ways to make a better experience but the most important will be:
Multi-stop navigation: add multiple stops within the museum in order to create an itinerary of the user’s museum visit as an alternative to the “free navigation”
Personalization: use machine learning/AI along with the user’s existing data, I can look into creating an automatically personalized museum visit that takes their previous visits into account.
