Create a digital companion for visitors of the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums.
Result
A downloadable mobile app for each museum. The apps are location-aware, notifying the user when featured artwork is nearby. It also features curated audio and tours, and a list of current events, guided tours, and special exhibitions.
Description
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco were our first museum partners in the bay area. Some information on the de Young was initially included within the Golden Gate Park guide of the original Guidekick app, but the dedicated de Young app and Legion of Honor apps were developed shortly after, starting with the de Young. These apps were our first opportunity to leverage indoor WiFi positioning and beacon technology on a large scale. WiFi positioning allowed for general indoor location, but installing beacons throughout the museums meant visitors of they apps could be notified when they approached an artwork that had curated content. The app was developed to a point where we could test with users. We recruited candidates using TaskRabbit. They were screened to make sure they weren’t already familiar with the museum. Then we met the testers at the de Young and proceeded to take notes and ask questions as they explored the museum with the app for the first time. We followed with another round of user testing and iteration, and then with final development of the app.
One of the best aspects of the apps was the opportunity to shape the narrative voice. We interviewed the curators talking about each artwork as we were actually standing in front of the artwork, so a visitor listening to audio in the app is actually listening to a curator who was standing in that exact spot, talking about it. This gives the audio an intimate and conversational, but enthusiastic tone, which was very different than the standard audio guide with dry, unemotional descriptions. The apps were well received, and both featured on the App Store in multiple categories. They were also the catalyst to collaborating with Apple on an experience for the Apple Watch. For a subsequent app update which included new design and functionality across 3 main areas of the app, I created a fully interactive version with Flinto (flinto.com). This allowed us to iterate and fine tune before any time was spent on development.
My Roles
Design, prototyping, user testing, quality assurance, audio editing
