MUSE
MUSE is an online platform that provides museum enthusiasts unable to visit museums in-person with an alternative means of museum visiting experience.
This project was inspired by the lock down of most cities — which causes the temporary close down of many museums — under the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.
Duration: 11 weeks
My Team: Ziva Xu, Huiran Lee
My Role: User Researcher, Prototype Designer
Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator, iMovie
Skills: User Research, Interaction Design Prototype, Video Prototype
Design Process Overview
Discover
01 Problem Declaration
02 User Research
03 Persona
04 Journey Map
Ideate
05 Design Goals
06 Information Architecture
07 Annotated Wireframes
Develop
08 Low & High Fidelity Prototype
09 Video Prototype
Discover
01 Problem Declaration
Among many different museums, cultural museums are the ones whose exhibited items come in various forms. This makes the transformation of physical exhibition to online platform more challenging, yet meaningful. We decided to research about the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, since it is more convenient for us to find desired users under the lock down.
Design Question
How can we transform the visiting experience of cultural museums in Seattle into an interactive online platform?
02 User Research
Pre-research about Museums
To get input on the project concept from the museum curators, we sent several emails to some Seattle-based cultural museums. One curator mentioned that the project will be beneficial especially under the hard time that both the museum and artist are faced with.
Semi-structured Interview
We interviewed three people with different experiences and interest levels of visiting cultural museums. The interview questions centered around their past museum visiting experience, including what activities they found memorable. The goal is to look for problems and design opportunities that we can transform online.
Research Result
We made an affinity diagram while analyzing the result, which is presented below.
Online affinity diagram of the user research result. The sources come from three participants.
03 User Persona
After analyzing the interview results, we made two personas, representing (1) a faculty member who is a cultural museum enthusiast, and (2) a college student usually visited museums as a mandatory school work.
Persona 1: Martha Johns
Persona 2: Jessica Min
04 Journey Map
Ideate
05 Design Goals
Provide a clear overview of the museum content, collections, and exhibitions
Provide an engaging online experience
Allow users to view the exhibition without distractions from other visitors
Keep human interaction experience
06 Information Architecture
07 Annotated Wireframes
Develop
08 Figma Prototype Highlights
Museum Interactive Map. Online visitors can browse through the interactive map, which resembles the physical floor plan, and have direct access to all exhibitions in the online museum.
Exhibition. We provide a virtual path that serves as an overview of the exhibition. Online visitors can click into each card to know more about an item.
Makerspace. Online visitors can craft their own gifts at the online gift shop. This adds to the interaction between our platform and the visitors.
09 Video Prototype
Besides the Figma prototype, I made a concept video prototype for MUSE, aiming to showcase how this platform could help frustrated and bored teens relief their stress under the quarantine.
In the video, I am invited to visit MUSE for an exhibition about magic world. Extra thanks to Professor Andrew Davidson, who provided numerous feedback on my work!
Reflection
First Official UCD Project
MUSE is the first “official UCD project” that I conducted in my department. This project allows me to gain more thorough experience with the UCD process. One thing I learned from this project is that,
Every step has a reason.
There were almost ten design stages. While each step felt like a short sprint, we included it because it’ll help strengthen and justify our design choice. User interview leads to the production of personas and journey maps, which later provoked design inspirations.
Meaningful Work during A Hard Time
This project is especially meaningful, because we conducted it during the COVID-19 outbreak. We had to look for problems under this special circumstances, and we adapted new forms of collaboration — interview online, making affinity diagram online, and present online. I appreciate the hard work my teammates, professor, and TA devoted into this project. If there is an opportunity after the pandemic, I would also love to pitch to some museum curators and let them know about this idea!