Art Appreciation Revolutionized
Gallery Pal takes traditional museum experiences to the next level, customizing your journey through the world of art. Using a modified GV design sprint format, I focused on curating app features that engage, educate, and entertain our users, while fostering personal connections with the art.
5
Day design sprint
5
Testers
30-60
Tester age range
Curated Art Playlists
Discover personalized selections of art pieces tailored to your interests.
Personal Reflections
Capture your thoughts and impressions about each artwork you encounter.
Social Engagement
Share your experiences and encourage your friends to join the art exploration.
Expert Insights
Learn from professional museum guides and curators.
In-App Navigation
Effortlessly find your way through museums and art galleries.
Embracing Diversity
Explore and appreciate art from different cultures and genres.
Life imitates art
Discover art like never before, enhancing your museum experience by providing fascinating insights and fostering a deeper appreciation for every masterpiece.
Design Sprint objectives
Create a fairly simple solution that could solve the problem
Understand the problem and discover what guests really need
Design to enrich the guest experience and encourage social engagement
Test the design with people in the target demographic and reiterate
Understand and discover
Art gallery guests desired a deeper appreciation of art and sought meaningful, immersive experiences.
Create simple solutions
Meet Gallery Pal, a simple yet engaging app that guides you to discover captivating stories behind artwork, enabling you to make personal connections and gain deeper insights into the artists' lives and creative motivations.
Design to enrich
Sparking social engagement and experiences with a platform that allows users to effortlessly share reflections and favorite pieces with friends and a vibrant community of art enthusiasts.
Test and reiterate
Usability tests revealed engagement, intuitive design, and delightful moments.
Understand and discover
Through analyzing user interviews and personas, I found that art gallery guests often felt they weren't fully appreciating the art. Additionally, there was a disparity in the amount of information guests had about the art—either too little or overwhelming. A significant revelation came from an interview with a museum tour guide, revealing that guests desire the ability to relate to the art and establish personal connections with it. They seek stories that resonate with their own lives and experiences.
Equipped with this insight, I shifted my approach to prioritize fostering meaningful connections rather than solely providing information. This allowed me to create a more engaging experience where guests can forge personal relationships with the artwork, leading to a deeper appreciation and connection to the art within the gallery space.
Create simple solutions
Through a careful evaluation of existing art museum apps, I sought inspiration to create a user-friendly and distraction-free interface. To avoid overwhelming users with unnecessary features, I focused on the core solution: offering visitors an accessible guide to uncover stories behind the artworks.
In addition to providing background information, I implemented a feature allowing users to record their thoughts and emotions associated with each artwork.
By delivering impactful yet concise content, I emphasized highlighting significant historical connections for each piece, enabling users to gain a deeper understanding of the artists' lives and the creative motivations that shaped their work.
Design to enrich
Social engagement was my other area of focus, so I created a way for visitors to share their reflections and pieces of interest with friends and other Gallery Pal users.
I decided on a combination of prompts and free writing options. This allowed users to face less anxiety over writing while having the ability to write as much or as little as desired.
Though users could save notes for later reflection, sharing those reflections and pieces of interest was an important part of the design. The goal behind encouraging Gallery Pal users to share their thoughts was to increase social engagement with the app and also to increase museum patronage.
Test and reiterate
I ran quick usability tests with 5 people ranging in ages from early 30’s to mid-60’s. The primary goal of testing was to discover if the features included would be useful and engaging to potential users. A secondary goal was to determine if visual hierarchy and design contributed to intuitive navigation and ease of use.
All of the test participants were able to quickly navigate through the screens and easily complete the activities requested. Most of the participants expressed interest in using an app like this while visiting museums, and they were able to provide insight that enabled me to make some improvements during my second iteration of the design.
My favorite moment during testing was when one of the participants was disappointed that she could only choose ‘modern art’ on the prototype, since she wasn’t interested in the genre. However, once she began reading the short excerpts about the featured artist, Yayoi Kusama, she became so fascinated that after the testing she requested we look up more information and works by the artist!
Project takeaways and next steps
The speed at which the design sprint ran required a focus on progress over perfection, ultimately helping with generating ideas quickly. Not getting attached to the designs helped speed up the process of testing ideas and reiterating for solutions.
Use of color and bold outlines on buttons helped prioritize actions and enabled testers to navigate the screens quickly and confidently.
I especially enjoyed seeing test participants get excited, and the diverse backgrounds and experiences that they came from meant that everyone had interesting input to offer during the testing. Their perspectives broadened my own horizons and strengthened my design.
Click the images below to view more from the project.
