The Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is one of Canada’s leading public, university-affiliated contemporary art galleries. AGYU believes that a contemporary art gallery should serve an aesthetic and social function, that it must be fluid and flexible and transform itself through a reciprocal engagement with artists and communities, including students at York University.
The museum visiting experience at the Art Gallery of York University is not very immersive. As a result, potential visitors are unable to appreciate the artwork or need further information to understand its context. Our team was tasked to conceptualize an app with augmented reality (AR) features in order to: 1.) improve the educational experience of visitors, 2.) improve visitor engagement, and 3.) improve accessibility and inclusivity for individuals with visual or auditory barriers.
To determine how we can create an immersive gallery experience , we conducted interviews with students and faculty who are our primary stakeholders. Our respondents were classified into three groups: gallery staff, students, university professors or faculty. We examined their gallery viewing experiences and expectations to collect data for qualitative analysis. These 20- to 30-minute conversations allowed us to discover their motivations, preferred AR-related features, and pain points.
Based on our research results, we started the process of ideating features for the app — first on sticky notes, then through individual sketches, then in wireframes, while refining details across each stage. Our team conceptualized the storyboard based on affordances, heuristic evaluation and user flows. We drew the steps the user will take to complete tasks across multiple scenarios. From there, we built our low to medium fidelity prototype on Figma.
Our user flow is designed around our primary persona, York University students who want an immersive art gallery experience. Our app has four main flows: Exploring Exhibitions, Museum Tour, Bookmarked Art, and Help section. Our main feature is the Museum Tour which allow users to learn more about museum artifacts through AR while they walk in the gallery.
We built a high-fidelity prototype focused on the following core features—onboarding, museum tour, bookmarked art, and support.
The onboarding provides user-friendly step-by-step instructions on how to use the apps AR-related features.
Users can follow on-screen prompts to navigate the museum exhibit. As they walk, they can find small icons around artifacts that they can click and interact with to learn more about the artwork. Through Adobe Aero, we were able to create an interactive 3D version of a museum artifact. From there, they can zoom in and out, rotate it by 360-degrees, bookmark it and save it on their account.
To make the gallery experience more memorable, users can bookmark a digital version of the artifacts they encounter in museums. They have the option to customize the artifact’s color or size. Best of all, they can see how it looks in their own space through augmented reality.
As we developed the app, we conducted usability tests with students, staff and professors to determine their perception of our prototype. The design of the final prototype supports our main goal of improving the learning experience, increasing engagement and offering accessibility to users visiting the Art Gallery of York University.
