UNDERSTANDING

The process began with all the reading of the material the museum could provide to the design team.

Since the museum was still in construction they had to translate to us the essence of the experience they wanted to reflect on.

In the process of gathering business requirements, we had a lot of questions like:

• Does a person need to RSVP for an event?

• How do youths and their friends plan to go together?

• What info do they need to go to the museum?

Many questions show us that we are facing a service design challenge, journeys of the on-site experience not defined that we needed to digitize on our website. So from there, we redefine our research activities.

The design team worked closely with the client to identify the target audience for the website:

So we came up with 4 proto personas: a teenager, a parent, an ex-pat professional, and a school teacher.

RESEARCH

With that target audience as a hypothesis, we went to the Singapore streets to run informal interviews.

What we learned:

• 89% of the interviewers defined art for them as a form of expression.

• We got 3 common answers to what users think of South East Asian Art:

  • uncertain of what it is

  • belive its traditional art

  • emerging and unknown

In other words: Potential users could be interested in visiting the museum but are afraid that they could not understand the art.

Another type of finding that we identified, content wise. Singaporean users will always want to know :

• Is it free?

• what about food and beverage?

• is it worth it?

Our next activity was to build the user journeys, and with this first methodologies was easier to define accurate steps and interests for each user.

We framed the Journey map in 3 phases: pre visit > during visit and > post visit.

And gather a lot of ideal features per user, like:

• For Mindy _ mom user : with a lot on her plate, maybe a reminder the day before her reservation could be very useful > pre visit feature

• For Wendy _ teenager: a hashtag invitation (on site) so her photos could be displayed on the museum website feed . user content generation feature > post visit feature

We joined with our tech team to depurate and prioritize the feasible features from ‘the nice to have’ ones.

RESEARCH ANALYSIS

As a result of our research phase, we defined the experience principles of the museum:

1) Accesible to all - 2) Unparallel institution - 3) Meaningful storytelling - 4) Evoke emotions - 5) Foster a community.

That, later on, will help us as design principles for the website.

Another useful interpretation of our research was to use the technology as part of the experience and personalize the content and web visit depending on:

• Audience type: Tourist / Family / Locals

• Geolocation

• Season

• In-bound

“I think museums need to be more interactive and engaging, cause most of the time it's just passive looking at exhibits”

INTERACTIVITY INSIGHT

STORYTELLING INSIGHT

“Very eye-opening. Some of the pictures I have seen before (online), but seeing it in real-life scale, some of them larger than life, and they really stare at you… it gives off an evocative feeling that you get from the large painting... and the context behind it, you start to appreciate the difficulty in creating such a piece.”

CONCEPT DESIGN

We were able to build the first site map.

Our great discovery in the sitemap was to integrate several sections that perhaps the museum had very divided by its organizational structure. We were able to propose: the research, networking, and school visit content under a new section named: Learn.

Since the UI and UX team worked together on the discovery phase (listening to the user interviews and building the user personas) was easier to come up with 3 design concepts for the website that we named:

1. Guiding curiosity

2. Shaping abstraction

3. Expanding perspective.

Each concept was designed with a different approach to solve the same challenge we identified - How to invite users to approach art and not be intimidated by it.

With the sitemap validated then was easier for me (as uxer) to come up with the main navigation levels of the web experience, and then to break down the main journeys into wire flows as deliverables for the dev and UI team.

74%

Of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their interests.

43%

Higher conversion of targeted view-to-submission call-to-actions than CTAs that were the same for all visitors.

Expanding perspective concept applies zoom-out transitions and even tooltips to navigate through the art piece to invite users to discover facts about the artist or painting style.

- Ms. Chong Siak Ching, CEO

“ Be the authority on South Eeast Asian Modern Art (all things art) – building Singapore’s social equity for art and culture.”

“ Users do not have to be aware of the museum's organizational structure to search for information on its website.”

- UX Team