Goal: To create a public art museum app that allows users to purchase tickets, view events, schedule visits, and view the expected number of people visiting per day.

Target Audience: 18-60 year olds and/or working adults, college students, or users who like to peruse art

Key Challenges: Handling all stages of the process on my own, first long-term case study

Constraints: Usability study is limited to personal social circle, only one main viewpoint for the entire project

This stage was research heavy. Qualitative research methods were chosen, as that was determined to work best. Involved in this process was user research, making personas, user journey, and competitive audits.

Pain points noted from research:

• Lack of time

• Subject Interest

• Other visitors

• Cultural Indifference

After user research, I began developing my personas, which were based on the mock interview notes about users that Google provided. After studying each user's pain points and coinciding with my research about concerns regarding public art museums, I decided to make two personas who each represented a general demographic found in the mock interviews.

Shortly, I developed my user journey map based on the first persona Marilyn. The goal for the persona was to use a website that will allow her to see how busy the public art museum is and what events they are holding each day. My thought process during this stage was to distance myself and immerse myself into the persona to imagine how she would act rather than myself.

I then developed a goal statement and problem statement.

Goal Statement: The public art museum app will allow users to schedule visits, view day-to-day events, and see estimated visitors per day, which will affect demographics of all ages who have interest in art by allowing them to be able to pick the most suitable day to visit the museum without any worries.

A competitive audit was made to understand how other companies structured their websites.

During the wireframe process, I first drew paper wireframes to allow for quick idea generations.

Then, after finalizing my wireframes, I converted them into a digital layout.

The wireframes displayed are the basic pages of the website that could be found on the homescreen. I used the information I gained during my competitve research to include pages that users would like to have.

The digital wireframes were then made into low-fidelity prototypes to test interactivity.

After completing the prototype, I did an unmoderated usability study. This study was limited due to my lack of diverse participants willing to take part within the specified time. The participants were three women and one man.

Mockups containing images, text, and color were then created. Due to the nature of this case study, images are all stock images found on Unsplash.com, and the text is Lorem Ipsum. The images will also be repeating, and there is no official content.

Most art museums had a minimalist, small color palette. I reflected on this trend and added it to the mockup. However, I do note as I look back that there are areas that could do with a splash of more color.

Here is the link to the prototype.

Accessibility

Measures were taken to ensure the design and flow were accessible to all users.

1. Multiple ways to navigate to a page. Users could access the home screen via the bottom navigation bar, then tap the desired page. There is also a hamburger menu at the top to provide another point of access to the pages. They also had multiple ways to get to the checkout page.

2. The settings page allows users to switch to their desired language. This would need to be discussed further with the client for specifics, and may only apply to certain page content. However, it would ensure ease of reading for those whose language is available.

3. Users have the option to switch between light and dark modes. This could reduce eye strain and/or enhance aesthetic appeal.

Takeaways

Designing an app means you need to be thorough on every detail. This includes the size of the content, the placement of content, the type of content, and more. I learned that for new phones, there should be consideration for the top of the screen. Something I else I noted is that as you design, you will see areas that will require specific functions that were not part of the original plan. For example, the Gallery page could contain all the images on the page at once, or users can choose the type of images they want to see and filter out the photos.

Overall Feelings

As this is my first project that heavily focused on UI/UX, I am satisfied with the end result. This project was a good start for me to understand how UX/UI works and how to make content better suited to users.

As for anything I would change, I would consider adding more color to the app to make it more visually enganging. While the design was made to fit with other similar websites, I think adding tasteful blocks of color would make it stand out more.