Navigating a new exhibit space.

Research piece for onboarding new museum goers.

The Project: New Onboarding Process

Client: ACMI (Australian Centre of the Moving Image)

Role: UX Research

Team: 4 UX designers

The Challenge

We were to create an on-boarding experience for an “object” that will be used around the museum space to collect artefacts of your interest. Once the artefacts have been collected, you can take the “object” home with you where you will be able to access your collected items online to learn more about it.

A prototype for the “object” exists however, they wanted further suggestions on what the on-boarding experience could be like for the audience of everyone.

My Process

What we already know

We discovered early on that no research was conducted prior to approaching our team and that we were not designing any screens. Our client wanted for us to create something that allowed the museum goer to immediately know what the object is and what to do with it within a very short timeframe — roughly 30 seconds. Although this was new to us, the UX process still applied and so before we could actually dive into it, we had to understand who we were designing for. 

According to ACMI, everyone is their audience. So if we’re planning on designing for a particular persona, we also need to show facts why we cannot design for everyone.

ACMIs Business Goals

  1. Be recognised as a knowledge brand
  2. Be an industry leader for the moving image
  3. Get repeat customers

Let’s check out the competitive landscape

MONA

  • All content fully virtual.

  • Save and access their experience

  • Extended experience

Cooper Hewitt Museum

  • “Collect” and save objects to virtual collection

  • Becomes the designer - collect inspiration and create designs digitally

  • Extended experience

Melbourne Museum - Road to Zero

  • Safe driving exhibit - Program aimed at older teenagers but younger children come back

  • Onboarding is less than 30 seconds - Name, email and tap to start

  • Digital native generation - Intuitive design

Let’s take this back, what do we want to know?

With this in mind, we started our user interviews

With these goals in mind, we conducted: 

  • 21 user interviews

  • 19 guerrilla interview

  • 82 responses on our surveys

  • Contextual Inquiries

What are people saying?

What are their takeaways?

Insights:

  • People go for interests, inspiration, learning, exhibits, art and interaction. 
  • Most of the time they go with someone else 
  • People want to learn more about the exhibit if it interests them

Contextual Inquiries

I had visited NGV on both a weekday and a weekend and my insights are:

  • A large percentage of people go to see the touring exhibits

  • NGVs free exhibits are not crowed

  • I noticed many couples and individuals visiting these areas

  • Families steered towards the paid exhibit so you didn’t see many families in the free exhibits

  • People are genuinely curious about what is on display

  • These exhibits are a lot more quiet - not as social as the paid exhibits

Testing out the existing prototype

We’ve talked to people, we’ve observed people but ultimately, this comes down to the object itself and what the onboard process is going to be like. So we set up a mock exhibit to test out how people use this product throughout the space.

Our set up consisted of 5 different stations with topics ranging from film to games. The on-boarding station was placed in front of the entrance and everyone knew to interact with this station first before touring the exhibit. We were able to conduct 9 sessions with a total of 13 people. 

Insights:

  • 3/13 users were able to figure out what to do with the “object”.

  • 10/13 responded positively to the concept and would consider using it.

Although people liked the concept, they had concerns over the physical object itself…

What does this all tell us?

There are multiple reasons why people go to museums but the underlying thing that brings people there is that they’re interested in these spaces and what these spaces have to offer. Peoples interests varies depending on what exhibits are on and whether they can learn from these exhibits or whether they’ll find it enjoyable. With these in mind, often people have time constraints and will only visit these spaces if it genuinely intrigues them. 

Who do we then target?

I could see students really taking full advantage of this object. In particular, young students in primary school.

Relating this back to the ACMIs business goals -

This not only creates a possible life-long repeat user, but it also aligns with ACMIs business goals of being seen as a knowledge brand and educational institution.

But how do we engage with them…?

Through the students teacher. As an educator they help influence and shape these little people. The Arts is part of the Victorian curriculum which opens up a great opportunity for ACMI to design for teachers and students.

What are teachers saying?

Problem Statement

Teachers need a way to receive educational resources from ACMI so that they can provide an effective and engaging learning experience for primary school students.

Journey Map

Suggestions

Incursions

  • One of the suggestions we came up with was to hold incursions and bring the artefacts to the schools. 

  • The onboarding could be incorporated to parts of the physical set up where students can use the object to collect information 

  • Get students used to using the object in preparation of future ACMI visits 

Outreach Programs

  • Teach the primary school teachers and get them involved.

  • Prepare programs that are inline with the Victorian Curriculum to help teachers save time

  • The program could include the onboarding object where students can personalise their objects

    • This will make it more memorable for the student

Next Steps 

  • Further testing of the physical prototype within the ACMI space 
  • Have outreach representatives so that they can reach out to schools/teachers 
  • Potential for online community where students can share their work with each other

Learnings 

This project was definitely a challenging one. I didn't expect to be designing an onboarding experience with no screens. The project itself turned out to be more of a research project and as a team, we were able to deliver valuable information to ACMI where this could shape the way the proceed with the onboarding process.

Defining the personas was hard but being able to back up the reasons why designing for everyone is challenging, gave me a solid foundation of who we should target instead.