A museum discovery & exhibition
companion app
Role: UX/UI Designer
Timeline: Aug 2024 — Feb 2025
Scope: Research, UX, UI, Design System, Prototyping
Design a museum app that serves both casual visitors and art enthusiasts. Research showed that existing museum apps suffer from poor usability, outdated design, and limited content.
The goal was to create an intuitive experience with layered content — quick insights for general visitors and in-depth knowledge for those seeking more.
Most museum apps are either too complex for casual users or too shallow for art professionals. Casual visitors struggle with cluttered interfaces and outdated layouts, while experts lack access to detailed, reliable information.
This results in low engagement and minimal use beyond basic tasks like purchasing tickets.
Interviews
I conducted semi-structured interviews with six participants, ranging from casual museum visitors to people with an academic background in art history.
The goal was to understand how different audiences interact with existing museum apps, what information they miss, and how much depth they expect from digital experiences.
I only use
museum apps
to buy tickets —
everything else
is too messy.
I’d love more
professional
descriptions, but
only when I choose to
dive deeper.
I decided to create an empathy map based on the interviews I conducted earlier. After that, I combined all the individual empathy maps into an aggregated empathy map. Below is a brief version of the insights I gathered.
This aggregated empathy map highlighted the gap between casual visitors and users seeking expert-level content. This insight informed the decision to use layered content (quick facts → detailed information) and prioritize a clean, mobile-first experience. It also emphasized the importance of simplifying ticket flows and improving content clarity.
Disorganized collection lists and unclear navigation make it hard for users to quickly locate opening hours, ticket prices, or exhibition details.
Art professionals and enthusiasts often lack access to detailed descriptions, contextual information, and expert-level insights about artworks and collections.
Many museum sites and apps are not optimized for mobile, resulting in friction: small touch targets, confusing layouts, and slow performance.
Users frequently encounter cluttered layouts, excessive text, or promotional content, which distracts from the core goal of exploring art.
Age:
Education:
Hometown:
Family:
Occupation:
24
Bachelor degree
Paris, France
In relationship
SMM Specialist
Age:
Education:
Hometown:
Family:
Occupation:
28
Bachelor degree
Bologna, Italy
Single
Art Teacher
I visit museums often, but it’s frustrating how hard it is to find reliable information about collections and artworks before I go.
To better understand how different user types interact with museum
applications over time, I mapped out the key stages of their
journey - from discovering the app to visiting the museum in
person.
This exercise helped identify critical friction points, emotional
peaks, and opportunities where design decisions could
significantly improve the overall experience.
Goal: Prepare for exhibitions, access professional-level information, purchase tickets, and plan museum visits efficiently.
Goal: Enjoy a relaxed museum visit with minimal effort and clear, accessible information.
Value Proposition
Through research and synthesis, two core value areas emerged:
Convenience — reducing friction and making
essential museum interactions effortless
Adaptability — allowing the same app to serve
users with different levels of art knowledge
This value proposition guided all design decisions and helped
maintain clarity around what features were essential and why
they mattered.
Goal Statement
A mobile-first museum application that centralizes essential information, exhibitions, and ticketing in one intuitive platform.
Enables visitors to explore collections, view professional-level insights, purchase tickets in advance, and prepare for their museum visit with minimal friction.
Two primary user groups:
Casual visitors seeking simple, accessible information and easy ticketing
Art professionals who require deeper, structured content about artworks and exhibitions
To eliminate the common frustrations found in existing museum apps—cluttered navigation, lack of mobile optimization, insufficient depth of content—and to provide a seamless digital experience that supports visit planning and increases user engagement.
By designing a layered information structure, improving content hierarchy, offering multiple payment options, integrating route navigation, and providing relevant reminders while tracking engagement to support continuous improvement.
To understand the competitive landscape, I conducted a competitive audit that included two direct competitors (large international museums) and two indirect competitors (cultural and ticketing platforms).
The goal was to evaluate how effectively each product provides access to essential museum information, supports mobile usability, and communicates value to different user groups.
Through this analysis, I identified consistent accessibility issues, content gaps, and UX inconsistencies that create clear opportunities for differentiation.
Competitors such as Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Louvre show inconsistent accessibility support — screen readers struggle with unclear labels, elements, and non-functional interactive elements.
Improve accessibility by ensuring full screen-reader compatibility and adhering to WCAG standards.
Content translations — especially long-form articles — vary in accuracy and clarity. Some sections remain untranslated or poorly localized.
Provide professionally localized multilingual content with editorial consistency.
Many competitor platforms do not clearly explain their core features, value, or navigation structure, forcing users to search for basic information.
Highlight key functionality, simplify navigation, and improve content hierarchy to reduce cognitive load.
Several apps and websites do not automatically adjust currency or local settings, which confuses international visitors.
Implement automatic or easily adjustable currency and location settings to support global users.
Primary User Flow
This is the primary path users take to explore exhibitions and purchase tickets.
This user flow focuses on reducing friction in the ticket-purchase process by keeping navigation simple and eliminating unnecessary steps. It reflects the core user needs identified during research — fast access to collections, structured information, and a predictable checkout experience.
This flow directly addresses the main pain points identified during research — difficulty finding ticket information, overloaded content, and inconvenient mobile navigation.
Design Priorities
Future Considerations
This storyboard illustrates the primary user scenario identified during research: exploring exhibitions and purchasing tickets ahead of the visit. Each step reflects key pain points (unclear structure, missing details, slow navigation) and informs how the final flow reduces friction, improves clarity, and speeds up decision-making.
Lorenzo is planning his upcoming trip and decides to visit an art museum.
He opens the museum’s app to learn more about it and purchase a ticket.
He opens the general information about the museum.
He reads about the available exhibitions and displays and chooses the one he’s interested in.
He immediately proceeds to purchase the ticket he needs.
He is happy because he visits the exhibition without any lines and with comfort.
This close-up storyboard breaks down the key interaction steps in the ticket-purchase flow. It highlights usability issues identified during research—unclear page hierarchy, missing shortcuts, and unnecessary steps—and demonstrates how the refined flow improves clarity, reduces friction, and enables fast, confident decision-making.
Lorenzo is planning his upcoming trip and decides to visit an art museum.
He opens the museum’s app to learn more about it and purchase a ticket.
He opens the general information about the museum.
He reads about the available exhibitions and displays and chooses the one he’s interested in.
He immediately proceeds to purchase the ticket he needs.
He is happy because he visits the exhibition without any lines and with comfort.
To ensure clear navigation and a scalable structure, I created a high-level Information Architecture for the app.
The goal was to:
I grouped the content into four main pillars: Homepage, Exhibitions, Collections, and Ticketing — each optimized for both casual visitors and professionals.
Note: The diagram below represents a high-level structure.
Detailed IA documentation (labels, metadata, content inventory) was
created separately for development.
Key IA Decisions
Before moving into Figma, I begin with rapid paper sketching to quickly explore multiple layout directions and interaction patterns.
This step allows me to:
Paper wireframes are a fast way to test assumptions, compare alternatives side by side, and align UI decisions with the research findings before moving into more detailed digital wireframes.
After defining the core structure through paper sketches, I transitioned to digital wireframes to formalize the layout, interaction patterns, and information hierarchy.
At this stage, the goal was to validate how well the concepts supported key user flows — browsing collections, checking museum information, and purchasing tickets.
Creating digital wireframes allowed me to:
Goal: Validate early design assumptions and identify friction points in key flows
Participants: 5 (casual + professional museum visitors)
Method: Moderated usability test (prototype, task-based)
Outcomes: 7 actionable issues → 6 resolved, 1 backlog improvement
To synthesize the data collected during the usability study, I created an Affinity Diagram. The identified potential issues were grouped into four main categories:
Impact:
Users instinctively tried to tap exhibition images instead of secondary “More” buttons.
Exhibition cards were made fully clickable, allowing direct navigation via images.
Reduced interaction friction and aligned the interface with common mobile behavior patterns.
Users did not immediately understand the purpose of the booking stepper during ticket selection.
Clear labels were added to each step to communicate progress and required actions.
Increased clarity in the booking flow and reduced hesitation during checkout.
Participants found horizontal scrolling uncomfortable and unintuitive on mobile devices.
The collections layout was redesigned to use vertical scrolling while preserving search and filtering.
Improved content discoverability and reduced cognitive load during browsing.
Users expected the visit date to appear before pricing information when booking tickets.
The layout hierarchy was adjusted to display date and time above ticket price.
Supported faster decision-making and improved perceived control over the booking process.
Artifex CF was chosen for its expressive serif character, which supports the app’s art-focused identity. Its non-minimalist yet elegant style complements artworks without overpowering them and remains readable across different screen sizes.
The color palette is inspired by classical artworks, where deep navy tones are often paired with warm yellow highlights. This combination provides strong contrast, supports the app’s artistic identity, and ensures readable interfaces on both light- and dark-themed backgrounds. The accent yellow is used sparingly to highlight key actions and interactive elements.
The onboarding flow introduces key app features, helping first-time visitors understand how to plan visits, explore exhibitions, and purchase tickets seamlessly.
The authorization flow was designed to provide users with a smooth and reliable entry into the app. Since many museum visitors access the app on-the-go, the priority was to minimize friction, reduce typing, and offer fast access via social login options. The flow supports both quick sign-in and traditional email-based registration for users with different privacy preferences.
Goal
Provide quick access to key information (museum info, tickets, saved items) while supporting both casual browsing and on-the-go usage.
Key Decisions
Impact
Goal
Enable users to effortlessly explore exhibitions and book guided tours with minimal friction.
Key Decisions
Impact
Goal
Help users quickly explore museum collections, filter artworks, and access detailed information without cognitive overload.
Key Decisions
Impact
Goal
Streamline the ticket-purchasing experience so users can quickly select a ticket type, adjust quantities, and complete checkout with minimal friction.
Key Decisions
Impact
This project reinforced the importance of early validation and scope reduction.
User testing highlighted clear behavior patterns (image clickability, scrolling expectations, clarity of labels), which drove simplification of key flows.
By removing unnecessary steps and restructuring navigation, I reduced cognitive load and improved task completion efficiency.
The process emphasized that strong UX comes from continuous iteration, prioritization, and adapting initial assumptions to real user needs.
