Designing an app for Arts et Métiers Museum : how to share a hidden treasure with visitors? Especially younger visitors?

If you have ever been to the museum of Arts et Métiers you must remember it.

It’s a great museum. They have amazing historical objects. One room especially is memorable: the church, where you can admire the replica of the Pendule de Foucault :

Yet… it’s quite boring after a while, especially for kids and teenagers.

Why? Just look at this picture:

It’s nice, you have good light, objects are perfectly clean…but nothing is broad to life. It feels like you entered in a giant stamp collection without any explanations. At first you are impressed but after a couple of hours (or less) your attention decrease and you end up bored.

With my fantastic team Cruz Fabien and Mellisa Inder (check their projects :) ) we couldn’t let visitors miss this hidden treasure. Design thinking is our key to improve people experience.

Before reaching the museum we looked on Tripadvisor and we observed a paradox: people had a great moment and gave good rating (rate is 4.6/5) but had a LOT of things to criticize! Great, but…

It was time to go in the museum and check if the visitors we would meet were going to share the same impressions.

We were lucky enough to meet very different types of people and learn about their feelings with the museum. The results were very close with online reviews. Some verbatims :

What was really encouraging for us is that people were really enthusiasts when we told them we were on our way to create a solution to increase interactivity. They were having a good time but wanted to have a great time so they were eager to share their impressions and ideas with us.

With all this precious data our persona came to life, please meet Nathalie :

Thanks to our UX toolkit (user journey, empathy map, affinity diagrams) we were able to dive into our persona’s main pain point :

• Lose of interest after a while because of a lack of context from objects
• Lose of interest because there are “too many” objects and kid gets restless
• Lose of interest because there are no guided path

and were able to come up with a solution linked with this little guy :

What common pattern can you see between him and the Museum of Arts et Métiers?

The idea is not to put pokemon pictures everywhere in the museum but to rely on the same very efficient gamification triggers :

• “Catch” the best objects! Some objects will have more value regarding their historical context.
• Watch the objects evolving ! Give context about the objects and explain how and why they evolved, with a bonus if you find the right order of evolution.

We also focused about increasing interaction between adults and kid because, after all, that’s why you take your kid to the museum.

That’s why we kept the idea about a double device system were adults and kid would follow a parallel path. With this solution we could increase the interest of all visitors, not only younger visitors. That’s why we didn’t create a childish prototype but instead we kept a neutral/educational tone.

It was time to go test it with the visitors so we crafted our beautiful prototypes :

People loved it.

Of course we discovered lots of room for improvement, both on the prototype directly and also regarding the global process of catching which wasn’t clear enough for every users. Adults also wanted to have more options to learn even more on each objects. Globally people were excited by the idea.

Just for pleasure :) and to illustrate how spontaneous kids are, an interaction we had when we tested our prototype with a seven years old kid :

In the other hand he was the fastest tester we had! He managed to reach the last screen in a very short time.

Thanks to our prototype and interviews we were able to learn these key info:

And we also clearly identify the next steps we would need to reach :

Such a rich experience!

In addition, something we didn’t test with users directly but all felt was the power of nostalgia! This museum is full of objects that reflects other times and habits and it’s an amazing feeling to see again an object that uses to be in the middle of your living room during your childhood, like a minitel, or even the old Velib system :), certainly a way to attract visitors on a “back to the future” experience :)