Blink Time

Aim

This APP is aim to design a mobile guide that helps solve the challenge of how tourists can explore museums and surrounding exhibitions more efficiently within limited time during their trip.

Motivation

My friend visited London and wanted to explore as many museums as possible in September. With only 2 hours for visiting museum, how can I guide her through each museum efficiently? When we know nothing about the museum, can we create our museum tour by selecting exhibits or interactive artifacts? I want to deal with these issues.

The whole project used the Stanford Design Thinking.

Find the pain & gains

User research

Statistical data from 2022 (National Museum of China, 2022) reveals that the total number of museums in China has reached 6565. These museums collectively received over 5.78 billion visitors, with their online exhibitions garnering nearly 1 billion views. However, despite the widespread adoption of mobile applications, only 10% of the 434 surveyed museums and art galleries reported offering a mobile application. (VisitEngland, 2023)

Green's (2017) research emphasises the importance of carefully designed mobile applications.

5 User Interviews/Focus group & Affinity Diagram

- To Discover the main ideas or concepts within the data into specific themes or categories.
- To Understand the viewpoints, experiences, and attitudes of participants

Analysis & Insights

Requirements:
- a sense of gain
- be related to my interests
- Provide good guidance
‍
‍Painpoints:
- get lost
- Repeated feeling
- Missed the exhibition
- waste the time
‍
Preference:
- Simple interface
- Easy to use

After analysing the highlights from the User research, we can find some key features -
What are my target users' current desires?
What are users' pains and gains?

Define the challenge

Based on what I’v learned about my users

Empathy Maps
- To capture knowledge about a user’s behaviors and attitudes;
- To help teams better understand their users.
Based on the empathy map, we can create two typical persona: a girl named Ansuya from India and a boy named Lin from China. One prefers to enjoy the vibe with friends while visiting museums, while the other cares more about whether they can better appreciate cultural collections and visit new exhibitions.
Using a situation from my data, I put myself into the scenario to imagine how they're likely to use this product and creating a narrative scenario.
Persona
- To develop a detailed understanding of the target audience for Blinktime.
- Through scenarios, we can gain a sense of familiarity and empathy with them.

Narrative Scenario
User Journey Map
Point of view & User stories
- To Identify the gap between the the problem and the goal;
- Actionable problem statement, that supports ideation in a goal-oriented manner;
- To focus the project from the perspective of those who will use it.
- To find the reason or benefit behind it

Going wide

Idea generation

Ideation Technique

For the Rapid Idea Generation part, I came up with quite a few ridiculous ideas, especially in the Magic Person section, but it also gave me a lot of inspiration and made me realise that technology is actually another form of magic. So, I thought, why not give it a try ‘Worst Idea Possible’, take a relax, come up with as many bad ideas as I can, and search for the opposite of the worst attribute. Thinking differently actually led me to some new insights.

Competitor Analysis

I primarily investigated the key features of competing companies, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as user reviews. This allows me to better understand how my product compares to the competition

Prototype & Test

Tests reveal insights that redefine the problem

Information Architecture
Based on all the previous research and interview, I began to understand my target users, including their cause of behaviours, pain points, and opportunities. I invited some participants to brainstorm thoughts to generate as many ideas as possible and summarized feasible functions. Then, I created an information architecture to organize the primary features of BlinkTime.
Paper Prototype & Evaluation Insights
Keep
1. Customizing routes is fun
2. Real-time messaging is needed.
3. Recording the museums I've checked in before is fantastic.
4.The VR function helps me not get lost.
5. The feature showing distances between museums is very useful.
6. It's convenient to be able to see nearby museums.
Increase and Delete
1. Add search function to the homepage.
2. Include ticket purchasing feature.
3. Move comments on museums I've checked into to my profile page.
4. Want to keep track of how many museums I've checked into.
5. My saved routes.
6. View the artworks I've favorited inside museum pages.
7. Route page displays the routes I've customized.
Mid-fi
Styleguide
Hi-fi
5 Act Interview Test
Problem Review
Research has shown that personalization can improve the UX by increasing the relevance of available to an end-user while the expected workload for using the customization feature is reduced. Therefore, in this app, generating personalized routes is a primary feature. Users primarily define their profiles manually through some questions. In the paper prototype test, the second participant expressed confusion about how to use the feature, stating, "I generated a route, now how do I use it?" It's evident that generating personalized routes is a relatively new feature, and a learning cost is involved.
Initial Design
Considered solution & Final solution:
We considered adding a menu for "Create Routes" vs. placing a button on the home screen. While a menu option offers hierarchical organization, a prominent button on the homepage provides direct access and visibility. We also considered adding a beginner's guide before generating routes, explaining how to use the customization feature. However, due to time constraints, this idea was not implemented.

The final solution was to remove confusing buttons after generating personalized routes and redesign the tour page. When users click on a card, they will be asked whether they are currently in a museum or on the way. If they are in a museum, they will be directed to a new tour page; if they are on the way, they will be guided to the museum details page.
Detail Iteration