Muse
Reimagining the museum experience for larger museums in the U.S.
2025
Overview
After ideating and conducting research, we realized that the museum experience left much to be desired.
I personally led the team throughout the 7-week process, and played a key role in the designing of the UI, implementation of proper UX principles, branding, style/design guide, and presentation deck. As well as conducting critical user interviews, surveys, and testing.
My Role
Lead Designer
Team
Olivia Pingel
Alyssa Waith
Cheyenne West
Timeline
7 Weeks
A sneak peek at our solution.
Museum Map & Info
When users open the app they are greeted to the museum map screen, allowing them to find museums nearby and view important museum info.
Museum View & Scanning
Muse allows you to swap between a global view, and an in depth museum view. Allowing users to view specific info about works within the museum. Can't find a particular piece you want info on? Feel free to scan it with our AR scanning feature.
Artist Info & Directions
View artist & work information with ease, as well as finding directions directly to what you're interested in.
Profile & Rewards
Acess your profile and take advantage of Museum Coins. Museum Coins are a way for you to track what museums you've been to, as well as gain rewards.
Research
Getting a research plan.
I led the creation of the research plan.
Museum apps are uncommon so we didn't have much to go off of when looking for inspiration. Our goal was to figure out what users had trouble with when visiting museums, and understand how we could bridge the gap using design to help create a better experience for everyone.
Research Plan
User Surveys
Interviews
Choosing interviewee demographics.
In planning our interviews, we selected six participants, three students who frequently visited museums and three museum staff members. Our selection criteria focused on both frequency of museum visits and familiarity with museums, ensuring we captured perspectives from regular visitors as well as those working within museums.
6 Interviews
3 Students
3 Museum Staff
Gathering insights from research.
From our six interviews, we synthesized the findings through affinitization, clustering key data points into themes that revealed patterns and insights to guide our future design decisions.
Creating user pain points.
From our six interviews, we synthesized the findings through affinitization, clustering key data points into themes that revealed patterns and insights to guide our future design decisions.
Pain Points
Interviews
1
Navigating larger museums for the first time is difficult for new visitors.
2
Visitors have trouble finding important information they are interested in.
3
Interactivity is severely lacking in some museums, limiting visitor engagement with exhibits.
4
Lack of support for guests hamper the overall museum experience.
Creating design focus areas.
My team and I organized our research into three key focus areas that guided our design. This approach helped narrow the project’s scope and allowed us to \ plan the product’s features and core functionality.
Navigation
Users frequently spoke mentioned
having trouble navigating throughout larger museums. Citing lack of information and improper signage within museums.
Designing unique interactions is fun.
Many users stated that they felt a lack of interaction within certain museums. With users unable to find more information about specific art they were interested in.
Information
Users frequently felt that searching for museum specific information online was difficult and not consolidated, which led them to feel confused and dissatisfied.
Ideation
Coming up with solutions!
Crafting our personas.
We created user personas to help understand our target users a bit better, as well as to help inform our user journey maps.
Also, our user journey maps.
We created these user journeys using the previously made personas for our journeys. We used these to help us understand certain touchpoints they interacted with throughout their visit, as well as their emotional changes.
Our feature list.
Using our personas, user journeys, and identified pain points, we developed four main features aimed at addressing our users’ key challenges and frustrations.
Design
Turning plans and ideas into reality.
Crafting a clean information architecture.
Before creating our wireframes, we developed the app’s information architecture. This process helped us understand the overall flow and structure, directly informing the design of our wireframes.
Then came the paper sketches.
Having laid out much of the framework earlier in the project guided us to this point, the design phase. Establishing a strong foundation beforehand made me realize the importance of planning that enabled us to design more quickly and efficiently.
We also needed a styleguide.
Having laid out much of the framework earlier in the project guided us to this point, the design phase. Establishing a strong foundation beforehand made me realize the importance of planning that enabled us to design more quickly and efficiently.
Typography - General Sans
Aa
Heading 01
Semibold
20pt
Heading 02
Medium
20pt
Body 01
Regular
16pt
#67CF9A
Emerald
#1E1E1E
Eerie Black
#418261
Viridian
#D8D8D8
Timberwolf
#666666
Dim Gray
I also created a component system.
Using our styleguide I created some UI components that would be used throughout the app.
As an extra, I made animations as well.
I envisoned some of our UI being animated, so I exported our frames and animated them in After Effects to better show off our vision for the product.
Reflections
Leading a project, and teaching others, it's a lot.
Helping others understand UX.
This project was with the graphic design department, and I was the only UX major on the roster. As the project lead I helped my teammates understand the UX process. It was difficult to help my team learn and understand what I was teaching them, but it turned out ok.
Communication and organization.
In the beginning of the project we had a lot of issues with both organization and communication. Taking the lead I set up a document with all of our links (Figma, Miro, Slack) which cleared stuff up a lot.
Cross collaboration is important.
I gained valuable experience collaborating closely with those outside of my major, learning how to keep them aligned on visual language, hierarchy, and overall aesthetics. This cross-disciplinary collaboration taught me the importance of clear communication, active listening, and understanding different perspectives skills that translate directly to stakeholder interactions.
Austin de Nijs
Say hi!