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How can museum applications and websites offer user-centered experiences?

This article was originally published on the CAWEB Master’s blog.
In it, I explore how museum UX can shape the way we experience culture, memory, and digital mediation.

All over the world, the COVID crisis has challenged cultural institutions by prompting them to rethink museum experiences and imagine digital mediation differently. Those very particular circumstances allowed them to provide content to people deprived of their freedom, but enjoying a precious asset: time. Even though the world faced emergencies, those months showcased the urge and need for cultural content. How did museums deliver innovative approaches to digital mediation through their websites and applications? Which types of user-centered experiences have emerged over the past decade? How did the teams think beyond the regular process? We will attempt to answer these questions by focusing on one of the leading figures: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

For years, museum websites mainly focused on displaying collections online, but today there is more audacity in the cultural market. It requires making an effort to diversify its product offer in order to broaden the target audience.

Thus, in 2012, the Rijksmuseum had already pioneered a new feature entitled Augmented Masterpieces. On the app, users added their own content to enrich visitors’ onsite experience by sharing their own stories tied to artworks.

It was created by Johanna Barnbeck, Dr Jan Hein Hoogstad and Shailoh Philipps through the Design Thinking process. The creators aimed to decrease the fear and feeling of illegitimacy that some people experience towards artworks. This concern is also shared by people who feel ashamed for not being tech-savvy. They compare themselves to an imagined “ideal user” perceived as younger or more experienced, although websites and apps should be tailor-made for everyone.

To ensure that the new digital cultural mediation was relevant for a broad audience, the team met and observed visitors and decided to value “empirical methods more than surveys and questionnaires”. The idea was to fully involve users and the entire museum team from the very beginning of the process. Shailoh Philipps explained: “Museum culture is full of assumptions about who visits and how they want to engage with artworks in the museum. It’s interesting to see how design thinking can build a bridge between visitors and museum staff. […]”

So, there are different methods to use Design Thinking, but the basic steps remain almost the same:

  • Empathize: Leave assumptions at the door and get to truly know the users, their needs, their behaviors, and their expectations by meeting them, running workshops or interviews, among others.
  • Define: Gather all those insights, extract key findings, try to identify patterns, highlight pain points, and define your scope. Use some tools: create personas, draw empathy maps and journey maps, in order to be accurate and relevant.
  • Iterate: Don’t be afraid of modifications: they are the key to building a project true to the users’ needs.
  • Prototype: Focus on the ideas from the previous steps, it’s time to turn them into concrete outcomes.
  • Test: Test your prototype with surveys and usability tests, then iterate.
Infographic illustrating the five stages of the Design Thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, represented with black-and-blue icons connected by dotted arrows.

It’s important to notice that iteration is required throughout the process.

Since 2024, the Rijksmuseum has been offering a new AI-based experience called “Collection Online”. More than 800,000 artworks (high-resolution images) are displayed to satisfy users’ curiosity. It delivers an interactive user-centered journey split into different paths:

Tell your story: Users can select and virtually hang their favorite artworks in a 3D version of the famous Gallery of Honour. It allows them to put themselves in a curator’s shoes for a few minutes. The galleries can be visited virtually, so everyone is invited to create their own exhibition. As the best ones are featured on the dedicated platform, this tool enables visitors to discover multiple perspectives.

Following the Art Explorer path, users can also play an active role by answering a single question about themselves. Some questions are tied to art, such as “Which theme do you enjoy the most in art?”, while others focus on different topics: “What taste brings you back to a special memory?” or “What is a simple activity that makes your heart beat faster?”. Depending on the answer, AI provides a significant number of artwork suggestions that can be shared between users. This is, without a doubt, one of the most user-centered tools developed in recent years. It also strengthens users’ sense of belonging. So the museum encourages a double dynamic: a reflexive process within a shared community system.

Discover the collection, the third path gives access to the digital collection stored and categorized by themes.

Nowadays, onsite and online, cultural institutions tend to provide user-centered experiences. The Augmented Artwork Analysis (AAA) team is developing a tool for visitors to discover onsite artworks thanks to Machine Learning Methods. Three museums (MNHA of Luxembourg, Beaux-Arts of Lille and Lyon) have created a database allowing the user to analyse artworks. The prototype, designed for one onsite visitor, aims at refining perception by focusing on different details of the piece and drawing comparisons between collections.

Same goal, different structure. Through gamification, users are invited to play with AI or AR. For instance Google Arts & Culture invites people to try filters inspired by famous works of art (Art Filter), match music with them (One Sound, Two Frames) or visit a fictional international exhibition (The Pocket Gallery).

So by creating databases and using digital trends, the cultural market is becoming a fertile ground for user-centered ideas. Some new museum platforms can be a bit overwhelming and “Kafkaesque”, leading to frustration for users seeking a user-friendly, clear and simple searching process. However, we are eager to see what innovations will emerge from this current period of digital experimentation.

Marion

 

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