GalleryPal | Cailey Booze

Role

UX Designer

Tools

Figma, Adobe Photoshop, and Canva

Team

Myself

Timeline

5 Days (Design sprint)

Enriching the Act of Looking at and Connecting with Art

Context

GalleryPal is a start-up that is looking to improve the in-person experience that users have viewing art in a museum or gallery.

The problem

While many museum visitors enjoy exploring galleries on their own, this often means they miss important details and context, limiting the depth and richness of their experience.

Methodologies

Day 1

Map

Day 2

Sketch

Day 3

Decide

Day 4

Prototype

Day 5

Test

The Current Situation

People generally prefer to engage with art solo and viewers often know nothing about the art or the exhibits before they arrive.

User testimonies:

Sometimes I'll do a quick Google search for a painting while I'm on my phone while I'm at the museum... but I usually just find long articles that are super overwhelming."

-Anonymous

I don't really enjoy group tours because I like to do my own thing... but sometimes I listen in to learn a few facts about the artist, or the piece itself."

I enjoy looking at art, but sometimes I feel like I'm missing out of the full experience by not knowing any background information or context."

-Anonymous

I like to form my own opinion about art, but it can be hard to do that when I don't really know anything about the artist, or what their intentions were in creating the work."

-Anonymous

There are so many times I find myself saying 'how did the artist do that?! - I would love to know more about their process and technique."

-Anonymous

I may do a little research before my visit, but I always find a work of art that catches my eye that I didn't read about beforehand."

-Anonymous

This leads me to three key insights: Viewers...

Feel like they don't have context and missed something.
Prefer to be independent, but would like to know more.
Are overwhelmed by too much information.

This leads me to the question of...

How might we... find a way to further inform viewers about art exhibitions while allowing them their independance?

Day One: Mapping

Research and Mapping Insights

Journey Mapping

I started with mapping out the intended journey of GalleryPal users. I started with "Viewer", and ended with "Learn about Art", as that is my main goal with GalleryPal.

A big focus for the experience was making sure visitors walked away with some solid context about the artwork. In my interview with Lena Carroll, museum curator and gallery worker, she shared that her main goal with viewers is to help people form their own interpretations and stories, and that really only happens when they've got the background info to build on.

Day Two: Sketch

Ideation and Inspiration

Lightning Demos

I explored a couple different applications that had a similar function to what GalleryPal is aiming to execute.

Google Arts & Culture

A free website and app by Google where you can explore art, museums, history, and culture from around the world.

It lets you see famous artworks and museums online
You can learn about artists, historical events, and cultures
You can take virtual museum tours without traveling

I really liked how this app lets you search up overviews of any piece of art that you want.

NYC360

An interactive virtual experience that lets users explore New York City in 360-degree views.

It allows you to look around NYC as if you’re standing there
You can explore landmarks, streets, and neighborhoods virtually
Users can learn about the city’s architecture, history, and culture without being there in person

I really liked how this app lets their users explore New York City in an AR experience.

Crazy Eights Sketching Exercise

I utilized this exercise to rapidly generate different ideas and solutions for the GalleryPal application, keeping in mind the analysis of the two apps above. These quick sketches were of:

A "storybook" of each section of the museum that provides context into each art era.
The camera on the mobile device photographs art and provides an explanation into the artist's work.
Headphones to hook up to the mobile device and walk around with so that the viewers can listen to descriptions of arwork.
A map that is interactive and helps the viewer find different pieces of art, while highlighting the most popular.
A guestionaire of what the viewer wants to see, and the application will guide them around the musuem.
The camera on the phone will provide "floating explanations" on the UI screen, and highlight "easter eggs" in the artwork.
The camera will have an AR/VR experience that will allow the viewer to see things in the museum that are not actually there, and correlate with the artwork and the era.
The application will correlate with the museum location and show what the most popular attractions are at that museum.

Selected Idea

After careful consideration, I decided that the best solution for GalleryPal would be to combine multiple ideas. To best fit the users of GalleryPal, I combined the concepts of the use of AR/VR camera, interactive maps, photographing the art, and descriptions/information regarding the exhibitions.

Solution Sketch

Below, I sketched out my ideas of using the camera for the AR feature, the interactive map, and the art descriptions.

Day Three: Decide

Decision

Storyboard

This was the day that I solidified my design direction. Below is a more in depth sketch of what the solution for GalleryPal will look like.

This is where the major UI components started to come together.

I iterated further on the solution sketch to come up with the below storyboard layout. Initially, I wanted to add a customization quiz, but upon further ideation and brainstorming, I deemed it unnecessary.