Kalab, an app for an immersive museum experience

KALAB is an app designed to be your companion, eyes, ears and feet on museum and art gallery visitations, whether you’re at home or visiting our venues. It is a design exercise built as part of the Google UX Design Professional Certificate program.‍
The KALAB design process took place during April 2021 - December 2021, as part of the Google UX Design Professional Certificate program.

The issue

With the 2020 pandemic, public social gatherings turned into a risk many couldn’t afford to take. How could we still consume culture with depth without leaving our homes?‍

The Goal

Building a virtual platform that served as a hub for visitation of multiple venues during the pandemic, also aiding visitors and bringing depth to a museum visit after venues were safe again.‍

Defining the problem

1. Interviews and Persona Building (Understanding the user)‍

I scouted a couple of people who fit a certain profile:

• Has been in contact with arts in some way (most of the users recruited were students or alumni of humanities focused graduation programs)

• Between 25-55 years old

• Due to temporal constraints, all users were Brazilian.

5 people were interviewed remotely to measure out possible pain points and gather insights related to museum visitation.

From those interviews, two interesting profiles arose:

• People who expected more from museums and galleries other than just the artwork;

• People who have had an issue or a pain during their in-loco experience.

Persona Building

From these interviews, I've identified two different types of personas - Yumiko uses museums and gallery spaces as more of a social meeting point rather than to consume art. Yuri, on the other hand, misses out on opportunities to fully immerse in artwork due to lack of accessibility.

As Elise Roy said on her 2015 TED Talk, "When we design for disability first, you often stumble upon solutions that are better than those when we design for the norm". With that in mind, I decided to investigate deeper the user pains that Yuri faced in his journey.

2. Competitive Analysis

Before starting the designing process, I sought out what was available on the market and generated a report of my competitive audit.

From those results, I understood that my project had to have the following characteristics:
- Light (light features, that could be used on every phone);
- Familiar (targeting a wider variety of users);
- Local (showcasing local venues and exhibits);
- Accessible (be a tool for aiding accessible visitation on venues).

Starting the design process - Wireframing

Before starting, I wanted to diverge and explore different types of ideas with a Crazy 8's exercise:

I went on to explore the possibilities of Idea 3, which seemed more feasible from a phygital perspective; the users would still be able to get the full experience of visiting a museum by watching the recordings without having to actually visit the gallery.

The wireframing process was guided by these characteristics, and mostly presented a very light UI.

From the refined paper wireframe, I started on some digital wireframing using Figma, which would help in creating lo-fi prototypes later on:

Refining - Usability studies

I reached out to the possible users that I had interviewed during the exploratory research phase so that they could test the lo-fi version of the prototype.
Each participant completed the test in their own devices and each session lasted 10 - 25 minutes, based on a list of prompts, with a SUS following the study.

As a result, the test highlighted the following usability issues within the prototype:

The findings from the usability tests were applied on the refining design, improving usability and focusing on specific exhibits, as to not generate cognitive overload.

Next steps

The scope of this study ended here, as it was just an exercise. For next steps, I would consider:

• MVP Soft launch: soft-launching the product to selected beta users and continue iterating on it based on user feedback

• Working on KPI's and OKR's, evaluating metrics using a tool like Amplitude or Google Looker: continuous evaluation of metrics to keep iterating on the product

• Exploring new applications: exploring new possibilities for the product - how would this product work if a user had a wearable device such as a smartwatch? Would they be able to use the app to be guided on a tour around the gallery?