Redesigning: Royal Ontario Museum Mobile Application
Skip the line and spend more time exploring. From event calendars to audio booking, ROM app is the only thing you need to bring on a museum visit.
Project Type: Mobile Appplication
Duration: 4 months
Role: UX/UI Designer
The Problem
The vast majority of museums aren’t up to date with technology. The services they offer are not interactive and often not accessible enough. The ROM app does not provide enough information about current events, ticket purchasing, and navigation.
Goals
My main goal is to offer an interactive museum experience in the palm of the visitors' hands while maintaining social distance. Furthermore, by providing the information in the mobile app, I aim to make regular processes (such as ticket purchasing) more straightforward.
User Research
Museums attract people from all over the world, and the Royal Ontario Museum is one of the most famous attraction spots in the Greater Toronto Area. In 2019, ROM welcomed more than 1.3 million people. I interviewed five people from different age groups and demographics for this project. According to the research results, people are intimidated by the long lines at the museum entrances. In addition, after the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors prefer to keep contact to a minimum and social distance as much as possible.
Pain Points
Based on the theme that: visitors are intimated by the long museum lines, an insight is: users should be able to skip the line by purchasing their ticket online.
Based on the theme that: visitors prefer to keep human contact at a minimum, an insight is: visitors should be able to explore without a tour guide or audio tour player.
Based on the theme that: after the pandemic, visitors are less likely to grab any museum catalogs, an insight is: all printed content, such as maps and information brochures, should be available online.
Personas
KEVIN
Age:38
Occupation:Back-end Developer
Frustrations:Having a heavy workload, Kevin often needs help managing his free time. He enjoys visiting museums with his girlfriend. However, they are frustrated by waiting in long lines in their limited time.
Goals:Wants to be able to purchase tickets on the way and get updates about new events.
HAILEY
Age:21
Occupation:Student, Part-Time Barista
Frustrations:Hailey is in her 4th year of BA in History and doing her thesis on the Medieval Age. She has to visit certain museums and libraries weekly and is nervous about contracting COVID-19.
Goals:Hailey wishes to do her research as contactless as possible. She hopes to continue her research online in the possibility of another lockdown.
Low Fidelity Wireframe
Since this was my first project, there were a lot of iterations. The more I learned, the more I changed things along the way. Halfway through my lo-fi wireframe, I realized that the final product would look like a bunch of unrelated images thrown away on the homepage. So, I have decided to take the risk and change my design completely. Instead of a homepage, I added a bottom navigation bar to keep everything more organized. Even though the second design is still image-heavy, the images are related.
High Fidelity Prototype
Above, you can see the happy path of a user purchasing their general admission tickets on the ROM app.
Overall Pages
Styles and Components
Accessibility Considerations
Users can switch to the dark theme to reduce eye strain and save battery life.
According to the Perkins School of the Blind, using Comic Sans helps people with dyslexia because the letters look unique and understandable. Secondly, Arial is their go-to choice for reading long texts because every letter looks unique and easily distinguishable.
To increase the readability, I also added an option to increase and decrease the text size.
For people with hearing impairments, transcriptions are available with every audio tour.
Indicating errors with clear icons to accommodate people with colour blindness.
The menu contains icons and text to make the app more compatible with screen readers.
Made it to the end? The story doesn’t end here, stay tuned for my upcoming projects!