We will be happy to present you with a design project. This month we worked with a redesign for a nonprofit organization - MoAD. It’s a Museum of the African Diaspora. It is based in the San Francisco and plays a vital role in the local arts community.
MoAD is uniquely positioned as one of the few museums in the world that focuses exclusively on African Diaspora culture and on presenting the rich cultural heritage of the people of Africa and African descendant cultures worldwide.
As you know, it’s challenging to create something for a contemporary art museum for such a creative place. And the double challenge for us, it’s to make it for the museum about other cultures and inspire learning through the global lens of the African Diaspora.
Let’s look at this slide. Here you could see current MoAD design. Our 5-second user tests and interviews show that it’s a bit outdated design, not modern with cluttered content, and difficult navigation.
We started our research with a museum audience. We follow MoAD Instagram, YouTube, Twitter. We visited some online events. And it helped us understand better the main mission of MoAD and the style of our audience.
The world needs art more than ever. The world wants to know the history of any art. It really inspires us. And during our work all these days we think that we should show all arts online like on social media posts. It should inspire our audience.
Of course, our user persona it’s me, and you, all our design class. But… At this moment, we focused on guys who are social community activist, who are learning more about identity and other cultures, who enjoy community dialogue about issues/topics that inspired art.
Our user persona finds multiple ways to interact with info, for example, like augmented reality experience. And he needs to find information quickly.
We had 5 user interviews. And part of our users says that in this difficult quarantine time, they struggle to find online content and entertainment that spurs inspiration and feeds their curiosity about the world, cultures, art, and history.
Also, we did a survey. Our data consist of 20 questions and 50 answers. 85% of survey respondents visit museums' websites to learn about exhibits and events. 80% haven't visited museums' websites during COVID. 75% have never used AR/VR in museums or on the museum website.
Our competitor's analysis shows us that, unfortunately, SFMOMA, De Young Museum, San Jose Museum of art didn’t use any tech virtual inspiration features on the websites. Actually, we understand that all this type of content it’s so expensive for the museum. But it’s an interesting design challenge for us focused on the online experience, and help MoAD to be such a modern online museum.
Next Steps
- Make contact with MOAD (after many failed attempts).
- Add more virtual features like VR Tours.
- Continue user testing on Hi-Fi and iterate!
