Reimagining Spatial Navigation

Re-imagining Spatial Navigation in a Museum

UX DESIGN | This project was a part of my MFA in Design and Technology at the Parsons School of Design. As a thorough evaluation of digital resources available to prospective museum-goers, this project aims to enhance visitor experience while planning and visiting a museum.

The Goal

To help visitors enhance their experience while planning, visiting, and navigating through a museum by augmenting existing platforms.

The Timeline

October-November 2023.

The Process

Ideation, market research, user research, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, user testing, UX design, UI design, iteration, presentation.

This project is an academic endeavor, undertaken as part of coursework in Parsons School of Design and does not have any commercial intentions.

How might we help visitors enhance their experience while visiting a museum?

How might we help visitors navigate inside the museum, and plan their visit based on their interests?

The project started out by examining user experience inside museums and identifying pain points. We looked at navigation and way-finding as a means of curating a better experience. The design process included extensive market research, usability research on existing products as well as in-depth user interviews. The project concluded with a design proposal to add a navigation feature to the existing website, a User Interface Kit designed within the existing design system of the Museum, as well as a high fidelity prototype of the navigation system.

We identified Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City as our site of intervention.

Design Proposal

The final design proposal included a navigation system designed to be added onto MoMA’s current website. The design allows users to plan and save routes, navigate inside the museum and add services as required to their trip.

Navigating Routes: Users can launch routes and visit different exhibits.

Planning and Saving Routes: Users can search exhibits and add them to their route. They can also plan in advance and save routes.

Route Details: Users can see next steps in their journey, and even look for alternative ways.

Add Essential Services: Users can add services like washrooms, seating areas and information desks to their route

Navigate on Smart Watch: Users who prefer to not use their phone while in the museum can choose to navigate on their smart watches

View full prototype below:

Mobile

Watch

Design Process

Research

Museums can be overwhelming spaces. They have large amounts of often new and stimulating content that engage the user. Navigation through these spaces can also be challenging. Museums have interfaces like websites and apps that are intended to aid the user in this process. More often than not, these resources are inadequate, either demanding too much from the user or not giving enough.

From this research, we wanted to understand:

What do users value while interacting with the museum?
What do their museum experiences lack?
How do they navigate inside museums? And how do they curate their museum experience?

Research Methodology:

Surveys. To identify museums of interest in New York City.
Market Research. To identify existing tools and resources available to the users.
In-Depth User Interviews. To understand reflective museum experiences, as users think back to previous visits to the chosen museum (MoMA).
On-Site Think Aloud Testing. To understand how users think while trying to complete a task inside the museum.

Survey

We conducted a survey to identify museums of interest for visitors residing in the New York Metropolitan Area.

We received 37 responses, from respondents living in the New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut area. When asked how frequently do you visit museums, sixty percent (60%) of respondents reported that they visited a museum more than once a month.

Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) was the most visited museum (100% of the respondents visited it in the last year). MoMA was also the museum most respondents visited more than once in the past year.

Based on the volume of visitors and the frequency of their visits, we identified MoMA as the site of intervention for our project.

Market Research

The Museum of Modern Art Website, on a mobile browser (Safari), as on November 2, 2023.

The MoMA website currently has a series of maps, for the different floors of the museum. Users are required to download the PDF file on the browser to be able to use it.

If users wish to navigate to a an artwork, they need to look up the piece on the website to find the number associated with it. Then, they need to find the corresponding space on the map.

While MoMA doesn’t have an app they run or maintain, the museum is available on the Bloomberg Connects App. The app is an interactive guide to over 200 museums, galleries, sculpture parks, gardens and cultural spaces. While they claim to have a feature that allows you to plan your visit, it is not available for MoMA.

In-Depth User Interviews

We conducted four in-depth user interviews, where we asked participants to reflect on their previous visits. We inquired about how participants planned for their visit, how they move through the exhibits, their interaction patterns with on-site information, MoMA’s digital interfaces and the exhibits.

Participants in our interviews were residents of the New York Metropolitan Area, aged between 21 and 50. They were tech-literate individuals who frequently used web and app interfaces to plan their daily life. They were also individuals with a keen interest in modern art and frequently visited the museum.

Key Findings:

Inefficient way-finding hinders museum experience. Most participants felt that when they move around the space with the intention of finding a specific exhibit, they are often lost. They felt a lack of functional mapping inside the space often created friction in an otherwise pleasant experience.

“If I haven't scanned the [screen at the entrance] and if I don't have anything on my phone and if I'm just in some section and then I suddenly want to find my way around, there's no way for me to do that without just going around in circles.”

Exhibit-adjacent information and media - beneficial but often inaccessible. Participants reported that they consumed the additional information often posted next to the exhibit - they felt the audio guide was sometimes unsuitable as they preferred to not be taken away from the museum experience. A few participants reported that the text descriptions on the wall were inaccessible at times, especially when the museum is crowded.

“I like learning more about the art when I am at the museum . . . I want to know more about the artist or their practice, and I look things up on my phone. I also hate how tiny the font size is, everybody is literally crowding over a tiny piece of paper.”

Participants were torn about device usage inside the museum. While a few felt that using their mobiles to look up information or take photos elevated the experience, others felt that screens distracted them from the physical experience of the museum.

On-Site Think Aloud Testing

To further understand user experience while in the museum, we conducted an on-site test, where participants were given a set of tasks inside the museum and were asked to complete them with the available resources (MoMA website, Map, Google, etc).

We conducted this test with two participants who were regular visitors to MoMA (2-3 times a year). The tasks included finding permanent exhibits, temporary exhibits, information about the art and services (washroom, exits, etc). The participants were encouraged to think-aloud while performing the task to gain further insights into their thought process. A video recording was taken of the participants, and their reactions.

Key Findings:

Cumbersome navigation process. Participants often found a disconnect in information and a challenge in connecting the digital markers to the physical signifiers.
- One participant spent over 25 minutes looking for a very popular painting as there was a disconnect in identifying the gallery it was located in. The participant was only able to find the painting after asking a crew member on site about it.
- Another participant was frustrated by the gallery numbers as they was trying to find their way out. They spent over five minutes walking around in circles trying to look for an exit. They stumbled upon the exit by chance, in the end.
External sources of information over museum interfaces. Participants preferred to use Google to look up information about the art. While they occasionally used the MoMA website as a starting point, they found it as a result on the Google search instead of using the QR codes shown next to the art.
- After reading the information card under one of the exhibits, a participant said “…See, I don’t want to download a stupid app and I also don't want to listen to audio right now - not really in the mood. So I will Google this myself.”
- The information cards were often unclear, and not very helpful in gaining more insight into the artist.

Research Findings

After analyzing all the research we conducted, we organized user insights using affinity maps. From which we were able to synthesize the following findings:

A need for in-museum way-finding. With the existing tools, there is a major disconnect between physical signifiers and the digital markers.
Users engage with the museum artifacts by using the extra aids and material provided by the museum. The current interfaces (audio and text on the wall) may be limiting for consumption while in the museum. Having to download an app can be a major deterrent to using extra interfaces.
While majority of users are for using their devices while in the museum to augment their experience, there is a niche who find digital screens/interfaces distracting from the physical experience of the museum.

Personas

We developed two personas as a conglomeration of our research and insights:

User Flow

Wireframing

Considering the needs of our user base, we decided to work with two devices when we started wireframing —

a phone, for a comprehensive experience through the museum and exhibits, and
a smart watch, for an uninterrupted experience for people who prefer to avoid devices.

We decided that both devices with our navigation platform need to include a quick way to view route options and a method to add essential services like bathrooms to the navigation route.

We started with creating ways to view routes, add stops and essential services.

We designed a navigation interface, where users can search for specific stops and create a ‘saved route’ that includes places they want to go to.

Users can access routes they created and navigate along them in the museum. Other services can be accessed along navigation routes.

These routes and services can be accessed on phones as well as smart watches.

Visual Design

Our initial visual design ideas (left) were based on the MoMA website’s current design language (above). Since our project is an add-on to the website, we wanted to maintain a consistent style.

However, as we tried to develop this style, we encountered increasing difficulty in making sure the interactions were legible and understandable. This was primarily because MoMA’s design language has thus far been optimised for print and not digital interactions. With the existing colours of the map, we tried various iterations of interactive buttons. Most fell short of readability and contrast.

We decided to redesign some of the MoMA website’s visual language to optimise it for digital interfaces.