Smuk
København
Smuk (which means “beautiful” in Danish) is a hypothetical modern art gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark. Its new audio-tour app aims to offer a clean, vibrant, and customizable user experience for sophisticated art-lovers and curious newcomers alike.
Dates
August 2021
Tools
Figma
Client
Student project at Google
The Problem
Many Copenhagen locals are loyal Smuk visitors. Thanks to word of mouth (and probably TikTok), more tourists and passersby are starting to visit as well. This is great news for any small art gallery, yet it poses a unique design challenge to their new audio-tour app; diverse users have diverse backgrounds, needs, habits, and preferences. Some are seasoned art lovers and collectors, while others are casual browsers who are hesitant to listen to audio-tours for fear of being bored. How do we design an app that alienates neither group, bur rather encourages all Smuk visitors to enthusiastically participate in the gallery experience?
The Solution
Create a fun, colorful, and intuitive app that considers users' diverse needs and preferences. Build in simple-yet-effective features that allow users to customize their experiences.
Pain Points
1
Physical environment.
Galleries are usually dimly lit and exhibit labels can be small, making important information difficult to read. These problems are amplified if the gallery is crowded or if a user is visually-impaired.
2
Boring content and design.
Interview participants who infrequently listen to audio-tours assume that most tours will feel like lectures, due to both monotonous scripts and austere UI design. Audio content should be dynamic and presented in a visually-engaging way if skeptical users are to give the app a chance.
3
Different schedules.
Gallery visitors allocate themselves varied amounts of time to explore; some want to take their time while others are quickly passing through. Tour apps rarely account for such differences, leading many potential users to forgo them entirely.
4
No customization options.
A user's experience visiting a gallery depends on their learning style, preferences, familiarity with art history, and more. While no audio-tour app can cater to every personal nuance, users deserve more options to help them customize their experiences.
Persona: Hana
Hana is a 34-year-old journalist and culture blogger living in central Copenhagen with her husband and dog. She’s a lifelong art lover who frequently visits galleries in the city. As a storyteller, she wishes galleries would make a better effort to explore how an artist’s life, perspective, and personality uniquely informs their art.
Age : 34 years old
Education: MA in History
Hometown: Aarhus, Denmark
Family: Husband, dog
Occupation: Journalist
“Every artwork has a story worth telling, you just have to find it."
Goals
1. Educate herself
2. Discover new perspectives
3. Have time alone to relax
4. Find content to blog about
Frustrations
1. Audio-tours only provide facts, not insights
2. Tours rarely offer the artist’s perspective
3. Galleries are crowded on weekends
4. It’s hard to save audio content for later
Persona: Amir
Amir is a 22-year-old freelance developer from Perth, Australia. He just graduated from college and is now backpacking around Northern Europe with his friends. If he passes by an art gallery he often checks it out, but he rarely feels comfortable there because he doesn’t know much about art.
Age : 22 years old
Education: BA in Mathematics
Hometown: Perth, Australia
Family: Single, no children
Occupation: Developer
“I've always assumed that audio-tours are boring and pretentious.”
Goals
1. Meet the locals and make friends
2. Find interesting, unique art
3. Learn about the city he’s visiting
4. Learn how to talk about art
Frustrations
1. Audio-tours often feel like lectures
2. Narrators use unfamiliar terminology
3. The labels next to the art are too small
4. Galleries feel cold and unwelcoming
Taking Action
After conducting interviews, mapping the journeys of both personas, creating an affinity diagram, and completing a competitive audit (none of which I've documented here), I was left with a number of actionable insights to explore in the ideation stage. These often meant considering simple, intuitive features that some competitors ignored, such as....
Playlist navigation
Each of the gallery's collections has its own playlist within the "My Library" tab. Each track within that playlist discusses a specific work of art. The app automatically creates playlists from users' favorited and downloaded tracks, and users also can create new playlists.
Corresponding imagery
It's important that audio content is accompanied by its corresponding imagery so that users always know which artwork is being discussed. Here, it appears like any album cover would in familiar audio players.
Downloads
Download options are available for all audio tracks and playlists. This allows users to listen to audio content at home, which is especially helpful for visitors who are short on time, or even users like Hana (see Personas) who may want to write about a piece later.
Tour Durations
Speaking of time...any given audio-tour comes with three duration options: 10, 20, or 40 minutes. This allows users to choose the tour length that best fits their schedules and preferences.
The Process
Now that we've seen some of the final screens and key features, let's break down the process I took to get there. Transforming my research-based insights from theory to reality required steps like: determining information architecture, creating paper and digital wireframes, making high and low-fidelity prototypes, and conducting usability tests:
Paper Wireframes
I knew from my interviews that participants most commonly spent about 15, 30, or 60 minutes visiting a gallery and that they wanted a good chunk of time to explore on their own. With this in mind, I experimented with tour duration options that would take up no more than two-thirds of their time (10, 20, and 40 minutes).
Usability Study Round 1
After repeating this exploratory process with other screens, I made digital wireframes in Figma. I then added interactions until I had a low-fidelity prototype, which I used to conduct the first usability study. The following are pain points I discovered, along with the actions I took to address them in my high-fidelity iteration:
Parameters:
Study type:
Moderated
Duration:
10-15 minutes each
Participants:
6 people, ages 23 to 49
Location:
United States, in person
Pain Points / Actions:
Many users found the hamburger menu slow to use, so a bottom navigation bar was added instead to make flows more intuitive and efficient.
1
2
Many users still found audio-tours daunting, so I changed each duration option to have a subtly different style / tone, with the shortest tour being the most casual and the longest the most serious. All this change requires of the gallery is some quick audio editing and a bit of music.
3
Users want the ability to pause and play tracks while they view the queue, so I added an area at the top of the queue with the current track information and a play/pause button.
Usability Study Round 2
Next, I conducted a second usability study with the same participants and parameters as the first, which helped me further hone my high-fidelity prototype. At this point, all of the feedback was minor or aesthetic in nature (things like emphasizing the guest log in or darkening backgrounds) as any major concerns had already been accounted for. Because the actions necessary to address users' concerns this time were relatively subtle, all hi-fi mockups shown in this case study are already in their final form.
Final Prototype
Accessibility Considerations
1
Audio transcripts.
All audio tours were accompanied by audio transcripts to ensure that those with impaired hearing—or even those who learn better by reading—can easily follow along with any tour they choose.
2
Dark theme.
The dark theme protects users’ eyes from strain when they are using the product in the dimly-lit gallery environment. This is especially important for users with impaired vision.
3
Customization options.
Users can customize the duration and style of their tour experience. This accommodates a wider range of learning styles, abilities, attention spans, and educational or cultural backgrounds.
Brand Design
One of the most common problems with gallery and museum apps is that they tend to look boring. In order to grab users’ attention, I utilized a vibrant color palette to create fun-but-subtle gradients for background and buttons. I paired these bold colors with minimal, classic fonts (Arial Bold, Times, and Times Italic) to ensure the brand design feels harmonious rather than overwhelming.
Aa
Arial Bold
Aa
Times
Aa
Times Italic
SMUK
What I Learned
First, I learned that interviews, usability studies, and other avenues of getting feedback are vital to gaining perspective on a design and how it should evolve further. Each study was packed with surprising discoveries that I never would have made if I had worked off my assumptions. I also learned that doing secondary research and finding a personal connection to a project can really inspire one’s design process. For example, having studied abroad for a year in Copenhagen during college, I was able to bring my passion for the city into this project, which ultimately improved my designs.
Next Steps
1
3rd usability study.
Conduct a third usability study to determine whether user pain points have been effectively addressed or whether there are any new areas of need that have not been accounted for yet.
2
Competitive audits.
The modern art world is always transforming to meet the cultural and technological status quo. Update competitive audits to ensure the app stays relevant and doesn’t fall behind its competitors.
3
Expand features.
Update the app to include more high-tech features, like zooming into track artwork. This feature was originally included in digital wireframes but was ultimately beyond the scope of the project.
4
Mobile website.
If the budget allows, create a companion mobile website for users who don’t have enough data or storage space on their phones to download an app. Tourists and other one-time visitors simply passing through will especially appreciate this.
Thank you!
Thank you for your time reviewing my work on the Smuk København app! If you’re interested in connecting, please reach out via the links below or through my contact page.