How To Improve Visitors’ Museums/Art Galleries Experience ?
By: Bowen Wei
Tags: User Experience, User Centered Design, Museums, Needs Finding, Art Gallery

5. Prototyping

After interviewing different users and identifying user needs and proposing different “How Might We” statements in part 4, we are addressing these problems with a number of solutions and created three prototypes.

Brainstorming Ideas

Most delightful choice: ArtChat (Designed by Bowen)

For the ArtChat application, we created a hi-fi Figma prototype (High-Fidelity Prototype). The idea is to create a platform for people who love art to discuss and share their thoughts and mood about art pieces with people who have similar interests.

We named it ArtChat as it is a social network platform for people who love to talk and share their thoughts about art. It is an informal, fun way to communicate for art lovers to chat, discuss and share feelings and opinions freely.

What problem does the prototype solve?

During our user interviews, we uncovered that museum visitors would love to discuss and share their feelings and thoughts with others while visiting an exhibition. However, there is currently no solution to do so asynchronous and remotely The problem we are trying to solve is mainly how do we enable more people to discuss art more freely and deeply. People use Yelp to rate and discuss restaurants and other places. They uses Rotten Tomato and IMDB for to rate and discuss on movies. And they use ArtChat to share their thoughts and feelings about art.

What questions does the prototype try to answer?

When is a good time for people to share and make comments on an art piece? (E.g when they are watching at art piece? After they are watching the art piece?) What is an easy and comfortable way for people to express their thoughts about art freely? How do we encourage more interactions and deeper conversations about art pieces? How to raise the general public’s interest in art? (Using informal social network way or more knowledge sharing way (see next prototype: SmArt))

Low-Fidelity Prototype:

Lo-Fi Prototype

High-Fidelity Prototype:

Hi-Fi Prototype

How does the prototype work?

There are 3 main functions that ArtChat provides. The first one is “Collection” Section. Under the “Collection” section people can explore different museums in the world. They can also find favourite museums and art galleries using the search function or by browsing an alphabetically ordered list. For example, if they want to explore the MoMA they can click on MoMA and ArtChat will display all the collections available in the MoMA.

If users continue by clicking on one of the collections, they can view different art pieces and comments or feelings from others about these art pieces.If they happen to be at MoMA now and are inspired by one art piece, they can choose “Take a Tour” in the MoMA section or use the camera function at the top left corner to use an AR feature when pointing their camera on the art piece. The algorithm behind the screen will quickly recognize the art piece and display emotions other people shared. Different Emojis will fly over from bottom to top. Moreover, visitors can take a photo of that art piece and write down their feelings and thoughts concerning the work. They can also save the art piece to their favorite art pieces and share the art piece with other friends directly. Additionally, they can tag the art piece for their own collections categories.

Users can choose to either keep their thoughts to themselves or share it publicly. By sharing it to the public, their comments will display below the art piece, and it will appear in a social feed.

On the home page each user can see other friends posts and comment, like or share these posts.

In the “My Collection” section, people are able to view their favorite art pieces. Furthermore, they can view art pieces by artist and their customized tags and share those collections with others.

By using ArtChat ArtLovers are able to share their feelings and thoughts about art pieces with friends in a fun and easy way. This will enable more people discuss and talk about art. ArtChat is the meeting point for art lovers.