Ekaterina Kachavina
Product Designer / Brand Designer

GuARTguide

Enhancing Museum Accessibility and Engagement —

Pergamon Museum

Role: Product Designer
Timeline: 2024
Tools: User Research, Affinity Diagram, Persona Development, User Journey Mapping, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing

OverviewThe Pergamon Museum sought to provide visitors with immersive experiences that showcase the richness and diversity of human history. However, recent years saw a decline in visitor numbers, prompting the museum to seek help in making their exhibits more accessible to a wider audience. Our task was to understand the motivations, barriers, and challenges that influence museum attendance and to design a solution that would attract new visitors while encouraging repeat visits.

Problem StatementDespite the cultural significance and extensive collection of the Pergamon Museum, a noticeable decline in visitor numbers indicated underlying issues in accessibility and engagement. Traditional museum setups often fail to cater to the needs of modern visitors, especially parents with young children. This project aimed to address these challenges by understanding the specific needs and frustrations of potential visitors, particularly parents, and by designing a user-centered solution that enhances the museum experience for both children and adults.

Goals

Understand motivations: Why do people visit museums?
Identify barriers: What prevents people from going to museums?
Increase frequency: What are the reasons people don’t visit museums more often?

Users & AudienceTo identify our target users, we conducted extensive research, including surveys with 11 participants and 4 in-depth interviews. Using an Affinity diagram, we analyzed key metrics such as demographics, social vs. solo experiences, personal circumstances, education, and sources of information. While our user spectrum was diverse, we focused on engaging new visitors and encouraging repeat visits.

Our primary user category emerged as parents, particularly single parents with children. Both traditional and modern museums often lack kid-friendly infrastructure, which led us to develop the profile of Ella—a culturally conscious mother living in Berlin with one child. Her mindset is captured by the phrase: “Learning about a new culture was like discovering a whole new PLANET.”

Scope & ConstraintsAs the project evolved, we honed our focus on the User Persona CV, refining the scope to address the frustrations of both mothers and their children. We decided not to emphasize the age of the children, instead defining our user as a mother with one or more children. This approach allowed us to create a realistic user profile, enabling us to identify and address problems from a specialized perspective.

ProcessThe design process was central to understanding and addressing the needs of our users, particularly parents like Ella. We followed a structured approach, starting with empathy to identify user frustrations, followed by defining the core problem, ideating potential solutions, and finally, prototyping and testing. This iterative process allowed us to refine our ideas continuously, ensuring that the final product was both user-centric and aligned with the museum’s goals. Below is a detailed breakdown of each step we took to arrive at our solution.

Empathize
We began by exploring Ella’s frustrations and needs. Key insights included:

Ella wants to integrate culture and heritage into her child’s upbringing, fostering curiosity and a love of learning.
She wishes museums were more child-friendly.
Ella has limited personal time.

Define
We focused on the frustrations and needs identified during the empathize phase. Through team brainstorming, we narrowed down the problems to the following main statement:
Culture-conscious moms living in metropolitan cities need to find a way to make museum visits pleasant for their kids and themselves because they find it challenging to balance their roles as mothers and individuals.

Ideate
We employed rapid sketching techniques, such as “crazy 8s,” followed by three rounds of voting to arrive at the optimal solution within our timeline. The solution we developed was a real-time tracking system for children within the museum, accessible through a browser on a parent’s smartphone. Key features were prioritized using the Feature Prioritization Method and included:

A floor plan of the museum
A GPS tracker in a bracelet
Connectivity to the parent’s smartphone
Browser-based service with multi-language support

Prototype
We designed a browser-supported real-time tracking product called GuARTGuide, which provides parents with live updates of their child’s location, allowing them to enjoy the museum while ensuring their child’s safety. The user flow was meticulously crafted to prioritize simplicity and minimize interactions, ensuring a seamless experience for those already immersed in the museum visit.

Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi Prototypes
Starting with low-fidelity sketches, we progressed to mid-fidelity wireframes, and finally to high-fidelity prototypes. Each iteration was tested for usability, ensuring the design was both functional and intuitive. The high-fidelity prototype encapsulated all key features, providing a realistic and interactive experience for stakeholders.
Usability Testing
The usability testing phase provided valuable insights into the product’s viability and user-friendliness. Key findings included:

Strong positive feedback from mothers, indicating a high likelihood of adoption.
Clear and intuitive use cases, with minor usability issues, such as the transition between screens 7 and 8 and wording adjustments.

Testing Outcomes:

Moms expressed interest in using the solution.
The use case was easily understood by users.
Usability issues were minimal and quickly addressed.

Next Steps
Post-testing, it became clear that enhancing the GuARTGuide to include more comprehensive guard functionalities would be beneficial. Future improvements include:

Making the bracelet responsive
Adding features to the application, such as the ability to ring the child’s bracelet and alert museum staff.

Key Learnings

User-Centered Design: Focusing on the specific needs of a well-defined user persona allowed us to create a solution that resonates strongly with the target audience. This approach highlighted the importance of empathy in the design process.
Iterative Process: The iterative nature of our design process, from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity prototypes, was crucial in refining the product. This step-by-step approach ensured that each iteration brought us closer to a solution that was both functional and aligned with user needs.
Real-World Application: Usability testing reinforced the practicality of our design, demonstrating that our solution was not only theoretically sound but also effective in real-world scenarios.
Collaborative Problem Solving: The use of methods like “crazy 8s” and feature prioritization underscored the value of collaborative brainstorming and decision-making in arriving at the most effective solutions.

ConclusionThe Pergamon Museum project was a valuable exercise in applying user-centered design principles to a real-world challenge. By focusing on the needs of culturally conscious parents, we were able to develop a product that enhances the museum experience for both adults and children. The project reinforced the importance of empathy, iteration, and collaboration in the design process, ultimately resulting in a solution that is not only innovative but also highly practical and aligned with the museum’s mission to make culture accessible to all.

Ancient Cure 3200

Market Research, Brand Strategy, User Experience Design, Wireframing, Mid and High-Fidelity Prototyping, UI Design, E-commerce Development, Responsive Design
Previous Case Study

Looping Group

Next Case Study