Reinventing the [AR]T Museum app by facilitating user co-creation and engagement
for a more creative and immersive AR Museum experience
Project Overview
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[AR]T Museum is an app that leverages AR to help users transform their living spaces into a museum with masterpieces from around the world. However, a closer look at the apps's offerings showcased its limitations in leveraging the full potential of AR, in-turn limiting the users experiences. As part of my UX for Extended Reality Course at Pratt, I focussed on reinventing the apps offerings, leveraging AR to its fullest potential to promote community engagement.
Project Duration: 4 Weeks
Project Skills
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User research and heuristic evaluation of the existing [AR]T Museum app.
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Restructuring the app's Information Architecture and User Flow
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Redesigning the app's User Interface
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AR prototyping on Lens Studio
Tools: Snapchat Lens Studio, Figma, Premiere Pro
The
Opportunity
Museum experiences have drastically changed in the recent years! People are constantly looking for new, culturally diverse, and creative immersive experiences.
The invention of AR and VR has expanded the boundaries of how people interact with art and has revolutionized exhibits and museums. Today, people explore and experience art in very personal and diverse ways and do so without even leaving their homes. People like having a creative stake in the artwork they interact with and love leaving behind their unique mark in places they visit. Furthermore, the learnings from my fellowship at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum prompted me to explore AR as a medium for creative expression.
The Solution
Leveraging AR & collaborating with museums for a holistic & immersive museum experience.
Facilitating creative collaboration through geo-location tagged community engagement .
Efficiently supporting users to map their own journey of creative exploration
Demo Video
Prototyping the AR museum experience
Design Process
1 week
3 weeks
DISCOVER
User Research
Heuristic Evaluation
DEFINE
Design Conceptualiation
Information Architecture
DESIGN
Lo-Fidelity Wireframes
UI & AR Design
PROTOTYPE
Hi Fidelity Prototype
User Testing
Discover
Understanding the users' challenges and needs
USER RESEARCH: KEY FINDINGS
Considering that the project was a sprint with very limited time for a usability study, I conducted Guerrilla Testing to understand users challenges and needs navigating the experience and identify limitations in the apps functionality and visual interface.
4 Participants were approached and requested feedback on the app's experience to uncover the following insights:
“ I love the concept of this app! I just wish there was more I could do with it besides just placing one artwork on my wall .” - Participant 3
“ I would like to have the option to search for a specific artwork to display in my background. Right now I just have to select from the options available.” - Participant 1
“ It would be great if there was an option to choose a specific museum to tour in AR.” - Participant 4
Identifying gaps and limitations in the apps offerings
HEURISTIC EVALUATION : KEY FINDINGS
To further ground the insights from the user research, I conducted a Heuristic Evaluation of the apps interface to scope out the limitations severely impacting the users' experience. The evaluation yielded the following results:
The app's feature of touring a museum does not align with the users’ knowledge in the world of museum experiences.
Users have to select a specific artwork in the tour to view in AR defeating the purpose of an immersive museum tour experience.
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Associated Heuristics:
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Match between system and the real world: Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
The app fails to provide and error feedback, resulting in excessive cognitive load and frustration.
Lighting and limited visual surface affects the artwork displayed. Quite often the artwork fails to display but the app provides no feedback thus the users don’t know how to proceed further.
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Associated Heuristics:
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Visibility of System Status: Keeping users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.
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Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Define
Exploring scope for design intervention
DESIGN CONCEPTUALISATION
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Providing users with an opportunity to experience an immersive museum-like navigation experience right in their living spaces by leveraging the full potential of AR.
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Facilitating community engagement through user involvement in AR spaces by leveraging geo-location tagging and collaborations to museum exhibits and spaces.
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Accounting for AR's limitations and edge cases and providing the right feedback to help users navigate error scenarios in the app better.
Restructuring the Information Architecture to incorporate reimagined design flows
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Design
Innovating an immersive museum experience through carefully designed features
INITIAL DESIGN CONCEPT SKETCHES
REDESIGNING THE APP UI
Design Concept: Users' curate their own immersive museum experience
The concept focusses on the "Tours" feature of the app. The design aims to give users the opportunity to personailse their experience by providing the option to search and filter a museum or set of artworks to tour in AR and save their favourite artworks to view later.
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Design Concept: Facilitating museum engagement through visitor co-creation.
The concept aims to foster visitor co-creation within cultural spaces to enhance the overall museum experience. The app detects when users are in a museum and prompts them to experience the museum in AR. The app motivates users to learn more about various exhibits and make their unique contribution to the exhibit. Museums can showcase the weeks top 10 creations on the website to attract more visitors.
AR EXPERIENCE DESIGN IN SNAPCHAT LENS STUDIO
In order to design the most seamless AR museum experience, I referred to the very comprehensive documentation on Snapchat Lens Studio. Designing on Lens Studio let me explore AR in real time while I designed and allowed me to share my design with my fellows for peer feedback.
Key Takeaways
This project was significantly a learning experience and allowed me to explore the ever-evolving world of Augmented Reality. Considering AR is still a very new technology, designing for AR needs one to devise many creative measures for user testing and prototyping. Keeping in mind the complex landscape of AR technologies and the diverse ways in which people interact with it, the next steps for this project would involve
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User testing the UI and Snapchat AR prototypes.
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Expanding on the features of the app.
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Analysing the accessibility concerns and accordingly making provisions to increase inclusion.
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Exploring the feasibility of integrating this app with museum spaces.