Ironhack Project 1: Culture & Heritage Wicked Problem
Solving a problem through the process of design thinking
Our first UX design project in Ironhack bootcamp was to tackle a wicked problem through the process of design thinking. We were paired in groups and given a problem. My team and I got following problem.
How might we help museums and other public institutions fulfilling their mission of preserving cultural heritage while making it more accessible to a wider audience?
Museums build bridges between art and people but people are not crossing that bridge.
Here I’m going to walk you through the steps of our process.
EMPATHIZE
Starting off with the empathize stage.
First we just brainstormed within the group what we thought is the reason people are not visiting museums as much as before. We split the thoughts in four groups who had a similar topic.
Our first assumptions we could group in three main groups.
Lack of accessibility — Prices are too high, crowded or the lines are too long, travel required and so on.
Locals don’t feel included — Locals don’t have the need to go twice, too touristy and not promoted to locals.
Lack of modernity — Too much information, can’t take a photo and share, boring and outdated content.
Then we did secondary research on each topic and did a CSD matrix. But after the secondary research of our assumptions we found that many of them were wrong. For example, we were sure that ticket prices and travel had a bigger impact on people’s decision on visiting museums.
Interviews
Next step was to interview five people. The people we interviewed were people who haven’t been to a museum in the last 12 months but consider culture to be a major part of their lives. We found out that people had a lot of opinions on museums, some bad and some good. People between the age 22–35 years old and diverse group, mix of ethnicities and different socio-economic level. With the information gathered from the interviews we could finish our CSD matrix.
DEFINE
After the interviews learnings we had our main insights.
Three topics were most popular.
Physical perception — Here we have things like lack of accessibility, long lines and crowded, too much walking.
Content in museum — Lack of newness, too much information, content is not relevant.
Museum is a social activity — People visit museums in groups and want to share the experience with others.
We highlighted the pain points and found the majority of them were in two categories, physical perception and content in museums. We identified our design opportunities.
Therefore we could make our user persona, meet Laura. Laura is a social urban millennial that lives in a big metropolitan city in Europe. Laura had many frustrations because our interviewers had many pain points. For here museum can feel overwhelming and often the content is too much. The planing and the visiting the museum takes too much time.
We made Laura’s museum journey in a journey map and found two mature pain points there. Laura felt frustrated while waiting in line for the museum and bored and exhausted during the museum itself. We decided to focus on the later pain point, the time spent in the museum. Then we got our problem statement.
THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
Social millennials living in a major urban city need to experience large museums in a way that feels more personal because content in museums can be too broad and not relevant for everyone.
IDEATE
Now there is time for brainstorming ideas for a solution for the problem. Our solutions weren’t all good but that’s the point of brainstorming, putting every idea out there. Though we had few potential solutions that we could group and found our main solution.
OUR SOLUTION
A social app to create customized museum visits based on the users interests & how long they want to spend in the museum.
The goal: Make museum visits a more personalized & memorable experience for visitors, therefore increasing museum traffic.
PROTOTYPE
After we finished the user flow we could make a lo-fi prototype.
TEST
We had five users do concept testing and got feedback from them.
The main findings there were:
1. The social media function of this app doesn’t interest users.
- They won’t link it to their social media accounts.
- They won’t share their tour experiences publicly or with their community.
2. They want a news feed with content based on their interests & location.
3. They want to have tour options to choose from.
4. They want to be able to purchase tickets on the app
We went back to the drawing board and modified the prototype.
NEXT STEPS
We also had few ideas for the next step of our solutions such as:
OPTIMIZE THE NEWS FEED
Conduct user interviews to understand how this feature could be useful to users.
INVESTIGATE TICKET PURCHASE FEATURE
Develop a prototype & conduct concept testing for an integrated ‘buy ticket’ feature in the app.
QUANTITATIVE SURVEY
To confirm that the concept is interesting and useful for a majority of our target.
SUMMARY
We had the challenge: Museums are competing against other media for young consumer attention and losing interest.
Defined the problem: For young visitors, content can seem too broad & not relevant for everyone, & they lack a way to make large museums personal.
And finally our solution: An app that creates customized museum visits based on the user’s desires & interests to make museum visits a more personalized & memorable experience.
Thank you for reading.
