The Victoriana: Designing a custom art gallery tour app for families with children
My Roles: End to end research and design, including: user research, ideation, wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, usability studies, iterating on designs
Introduction
The Product: The Victoriana is a large fictional art gallery in Vienna, Austria, based on the Albertina Gallery. It features many rooms of European art, and exploring the gallery without a guide can feel overwhelming, especially for families with children. I designed an app that provides a way for visitors to create a custom tour that fits their schedule and interests.
Duration: June 2021 - July 2021
The Problem: Visitors to the Victoriana Museum are often tourists who are constrained by tight schedules, as well as by the interests and attention spans of the youngest members of their group. Visitors may also feel overwhelmed by the size of the gallery, and may not know where to start or how to proceed through the galleries.
Pre-made virtual tours often don’t meet their needs, especially in terms of time or interest, and because of that, visitors often do not use them.
The Goal: To create a virtual tour app that allows visitors to customize a tour based on their group’s needs.
My Role: End to end research and design, including: user research, ideation, wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, usability studies, iterating on designs
User research
User Research Summary: I conducted interviews and created user personas in order to identify the different kinds of people who go to art galleries. One consistent kind of user I found was someone who visited galleries while on vacation.
Before conducting this research, I imagined the average gallery-goer as someone who had an education in art, and lived close to galleries that they visited often. While this assumption proved true for some users, I originally didn’t think to consider someone who only goes to galleries as a tourist, but this turned out to be a significant demographic.
Pain points:
Lacks Context: As a new visitor to both the gallery and the city where the gallery is located, the user needs basic context about why the gallery and the art exist.
Has Limited Time: Travelers often have tight itineraries in order to accomplish all of their travel goals, so they want to know where to go in the gallery to get the most out of their quick visit.
Kids are Bored: A user traveling with their family might have even less time than they want if their kids are not interested in the gallery. They need to keep the kids engaged as well.
Not interested in conventional history: Learning “boring” facts like the artists’ names and the year the art was made doesn’t interest this user. They want interesting factoids they may not find on their own.
Problem Statement: Jose is a tourist on vacation with his family who needs a way to enjoy an art gallery quickly because his time and his family’s attention span are limited.
Jose’s Journey
Starting the design
Paper wireframes: I used this stage to narrow down what questions I wanted to ask the user in order to create a custom tour, as well as to see where different functionality might fit in. At this point, I was creating a tour for a real gallery in Vienna called the Albertina, which the current fictional gallery “Victoriana” is based on.
Digital Wireframes: I wanted the tour creation experience to feel easy, and have a clear beginning and end. Because I narrowed the customization down to only three factors (duration, children, and interests), I chose to display one question per screen, with a progress bar reflecting where the user is in the tour creation journey.
The tour itself needed to accommodate both adults and children, as well as groups whose members didn’t all have a device to view the tour. In this group of screens, we can see that one device can have access to both the adult and child versions, and is able to switch between the two.
Low-fidelity prototype: The low-fidelity prototype allows the user to simulate creating a tour, and then taking the tour as an adult with a child also using the same device. This is the first iteration before user testing.
View the Victoriana virtual tour low-fidelity prototype.
Usability studies: I conducted two rounds of usability studies. During the first round, I learned that a major feature of the app, being able to share a tour with your group, was difficult to understand, and used that to inform the hi-fi mockups. In the second round of testing, I learned that users wanted more information about where they were within the tour.
Round 1 findings:
Users wanted to control which version of their group’s tour they saw
Users didn’t understand how to use the QR code feature
Users didn’t understand what to do to access their tour
Round 2 findings:
Users wanted to be able to go to a previous room in the tour
Users wanted more info about how much time/art/rooms were left in the tour
Users wanted to use the progress bar as navigation during tour creation
Refining the Design
Mockups: Because several users didn’t know that they could add more devices to a tour, or how to do it, I added a button to add more devices on the tour splash screen. This informed users that adding more devices something they could do earlier, before their tour began.
I learned from the second usability study that users wanted more information about how much time and how many rooms were left in their tour. They also wanted to be able to go to a previous room on their tour. I updated the tour page based on these findings.
High-Fidelity Prototype: The completed high-fidelity prototype included two main user flows: creating a tour and going on the tour. It included one fully prototyped multi-select screen, as well as several partially prototyped ones.
View the completed Victoriana Tour app high-fidelity prototype. Most of the functionality is prototyped, so feel free to click around!
Accessibility Considerations:
One of the main features of the app is making the tours accessible for all age groups. The children’s tour was designed as a treasure hunt with varying reading and difficulty levels.
There are navigation redundancies throughout the app to accommodate several navigation styles. For example, the user is able to go to the home screen using the Victoriana “V” logo, or by accessing Home through the hamburger menu, or even by using the back buttons.
The pictures and art are labeled for viewers with visual impairments. Each tour entry would include a visual description of the art as well as the usual history and context you would expect.
Going Forward
Impact: This app allows art gallery visitors to engage with the art at a gallery in their own unique way. It takes into consideration how much time they want to spend, what their interests are, and accommodates the needs of groups with children.
A quote from user testing: “This app is beautiful. I wish that I could actually take this tour!”
What I learned: In creating this app, I learned that my first idea of who the target user is might be biased and inaccurate, and that listening to and acting upon user feedback is critical in understand who will be using your product, and how.
Next Steps:
Complete the experience by fleshing out ticket buying functionality, which is something several users thought would be helpful.
Conduct more user research to determine if the pain points have been adequately addressed.
Conducting user research with children to determine if the children’s version of the tour meets their needs and interests.
Let’s Connect!
Thank you for reviewing my work on the Victoriana Tour app. If you’d like to work together, email me at pollard.cyn@gmail.com