The Columbia County Historical Society is a museum that preserves and interprets the history, heritage, and culture of Columbia County, New York.
In addition to a research library and a collection of 15,000 artifacts, CCHS owns three historic properties.
In collaboration with the Executive Director and Director of Communications, I worked around a limited development budget and a continuous rebranding process to add an end-to-end application that will enhance the educational experience for visitors.
Interior images of four historic landmarks open to CCHS visitors.
During our kick-off meeting, CCHS expressed their struggle with funding and staffing issues that have resulted in the seasonal closures of its most popular historic sites.
Many people travel near and far to experience these sites, which has led to visitor dissatisfaction.
Lisa W., CCHS Executive Director:
“Our main issue is that visitors have limited access to the Van Alen historic site. We want all visitors to feel welcome and have the chance to explore and learn from our historic sites while we work to address the issues causing these barriers.”
The Solution: Creating an Accessible Education App
Vanderpal:
A museum app that allows visitors to experience Columbia County Historical Society's historic sites from anywhere while enhancing the in-person tour experience.
⬆️ Increase donations to help fund programs and solve staffing shortages
⬆️ Increase new audiences while retaining a current audience, especially attracting younger audiences that have been increasingly moving to Columbia County
Constraints
💸 Unpredictable budget dependent on grant funding: CCHS wants to see the project developed, but has limited funding that depends on uncertain grants. Therefore, the app should balance business and user goals while keeping elements simple.
🙋🏽♀️ Accessible to all audiences, from new visitors to returning members: The average age of CCHS visitors is 50 years old. to uphold the goal to sustain current but grow new, younger audiences, accessibility of both UI, UX, and content of the app will be a key focus.
Discover the learning methods history enthusiasts and casual audiences enjoy the most and how they retain the information they learn
Understand possible frustrations or indifference to going to museums and learning about art and history
Discover the primary goals of history enthusiasts and casual audiences when learning about art and history
Secondary Research - Competitor Analysis
Based on secondary research, it is clear that most small museums like Columbia County Historical Society, do not have educational apps. Museum apps are typically created by larger museums with more funding.
To dive deeper, we examined four competitors in the EdTech industry and identified a few small museum apps to compare directly. While plagued with weak, outdated UI, one thing they had in common was the inclusion of compelling stories with immersive and interactive educational experiences.
A competitor analysis of education and museum apps, from a small to large user base.
Primary Research - User Interviews
To understand CCHS’s audience, I interviewed museum professionals and casual learners, who each makeup half of their current audience. This will help CCHS learn about their goals, feelings, and frustrations regarding museums and history learning.
Archetype 1: The Casual Museum-Goer
🗨️ Have you run into barriers learning history?
“There are concepts I learned that I have in mind butcan't quite articulate the terminology for.”
- Kali, Interests: Art and History
🗨️How do you find you best retain information?
“I learn best fromhands-on experiences.”
- Megan, Interests: Art and National Parks
🗨️What do you think is the purpose of museums?
“It makes me happy that museums are working on being moreinclusive, morediverse, but also trying to beaccessible.”
- Megan Interests: Art and National Parks
Archetype 2: The History Professional
🗨️ Have you run into barriers learning history?
“Can I trust the source that I'm looking at?Especially when you have sources that either try to cover things up or try to focus on one thing too much.”
- Chris, National Park Ranger
🗨️How do you find you best retain information?
“Being at a historic site physically andseeing everything for yourself, it's really hard to substitute that in a documentary.”
- Mark, History Teacher
🗨️What do you think is the purpose of museums?
“It doesn’t always have to be an academic endeavor. I think museums are for people to have funand to be able to relax.”
Synthesizing these responses through affinity mapping revealed three key themes shared by all participants:
Key theme #1: Trustworthiness of Information
100% of participants expressed concern about the issue of misinformation and questioned the credibilityof historical and museum resources. Specifically, they wanted to know more about the people behind the given narrative.
Key theme #2: Accessibility to Education
100% of participants agreed that museums should serve as a place for the public to remember our past. Key characteristics that participants felt museums should exhibit include being educational, fun, inviting, and accessible to the wider community.
Key theme #3: Immersive Learning Methods
100% of participants expressed that hands-on, interactive, and personal learning experiences are the most effective for learning and remembering history.
To gain a comprehensive understanding of our users when they learn about history, I mapped out the emotions, thoughts, and actions of both casual museum-goers and history enthusiasts.
Bethany - The Casual Museum Goer
Empathy Map.
Brewer - The History Professional
Empathy Map.
How Might We Ensure the Trustworthiness of Sources that Museum-Goers and Professionals Learn From?
Lisa W., CCHS Executive Director:
“These insights are shocking. I thought people came to museums because they trusted us, but it seems times are changing and we need to stay relevant by emphasizing our mission and primary sources.”
Prioritizing Features with an Unpredictable Budget
The CCHS Director and I discussed user features with a limited budget. The Director suggested applying for museum technology grants, however, we can’t guarantee how much funding we will receive if any at all. Grants usually require all features in the first phase, so we included essential and optional features with the ability to scale back if necessary.
To determine our necessary features, as well as identify opportunities to scale back, we utilized the MOSCOW method to define the impact and effort of each feature.
Reassuring Trustworthiness and Accessibility Through Card Sorting
We had five users with history interests sort cards in a hybrid study to ensure the information architecture aligns with their mental models.
Account
66% participant agreement on cards sorted
Tours and Exhibits
59% participant agreement on cards sorted
Home
51% participant agreement on cards sorted
Support
44% participant agreement on cards sorted
Social
44% participant agreement on cards sorted
Info
37% participant agreement on cards sorted
Similarity Matric of card sorting themes.
⚖️
Card Sort Summary and Trade-offs:
Overall, participants seem to have a familiarity with tour and account UI patterns from other apps and competitors.
Although an agreement goal of 70% would have been ideal, given the time constraints we felt this agreement rate was satisfactory in addition to user testing later in the process.
Immersive Virtual Tour User Flow
To ensure the immersion of the user’s educational experience, we created a virtual tour flow that will allow users to freely take many alternative paths throughout the tour while keeping the integrity of the narrative.
To find the optimal solution, I felt it would be best to create a group environment where the stakeholders and I can collaborate to generate the best ideas.
Timeline:
20 minutes
Miro onboarding and defining the goals of the workshop
Ideate mass HMW solutions with voting dots on the best ideas
Portion of the Miro board for the team to brainstorm solutions and vote on the best ideas.
30 minutes
Prioritize the best ideas
Define the effort and impact of these ideas
Portion of the Miro board where the team organized best-voted solutions into levels of impact/effort.
25 minutes
Choose the two most impactful ideas
Decide clear action steps to bring ideas to life
A portion of the Miro board where the team chose the two most realistic and impactful ideas to create action steps for.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes from Ideation Workshop
With the remaining 30 minutes, the stakeholders and I sketched sets of low-fidelity key screens and identified the best screens, features and layouts to bring to higher fidelity.
Team-generated low-fidelity wireframes with notes and voting marks.
During mid-fidelity wireframing, we encountered the challenge to ensure high-quality images and primary sources to support users' educational goals. To achieve this, we spent a day at the museum looking for accurate images and historical context for all content in the app.
With these primary sources, I ensured the credibility of the content. This allowed the stakeholder and I to focus on the layout and accessibility of the app.
Conducting primary research at the CCHS library to support mid-fidelity context.
Branding
Consistent Rebranding from Current Website
CCHS is undergoing a rebranding and website redesign process simultaneously with the app development. To best practice consistency, we used the same logo, interface color uses, and typography as the website for familiarity and to define CCHS’s new identity.
UI Library
Ensuring Card Accessibility
To ensure that the app remains readable while showcasing historical images, I applied gradient overlays on cards. This technique ensures that text has sufficient color contrast and remains easy to read, while the images remain compelling.
Establishing Clear Navigation
We provided universal navigation patterns and clear affordances for the virtual tour through bottom sheets, bottom/side navigation and pagination.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Exploring the Museum in High-Fidelity
1) Luykas Van Alen Tour Page - Choosing your own educational adventure (left)
2) Intro to the Virtual Tour - Get an overview of your tour to look back on (middle)
3) Inside the Best Room Virtual Tour - Immerse yourself in each historic site (right)
Testing Educational and Navigational Accessibility
I conducted remote usability tests with five museum-goers and history enthusiasts to test the educational impact, contextual and physical accessibility of the app. Some testers had disabilities that affect readability.
Task Flow #1: Finding the Luykas Van Alen Virtual Tour
“A lot of museums with apps try to do something new and novel that doesn’t feel necessary, this is clean and straightforward”
- Emily, Museum Curator
Task Flow #2: Navigating the Virtual Tour of the Luykas Van Alen Best Room
“As you know, I’m color blind, and everything looks clear to me. It is very accessible because people can learn while they are there or at home. You are also tackling difficult but important stories.”
- Chris, National Park Ranger
Usability Test Results
Success Metrics 🏆
At least four out of five users successfully completed the tasks
Users had two or fewer errors that they recovered from
Satisfaction scale rating of 4 or more for accessibility
Satisfaction scale rating of 4 or more for navigation
Key Results 📝
All users successfully completed all tasks ✔️
All users had one or no errors and recovered from them ✔️
All users rated the accessibility of the app a 4 or higher, with one of those users having color blindness ✔️
3 out of 5 users rated the navigation of the app a 4, while two users rated a 3 ❗
Iterations To Enhance Tour Navigation
Although given an acceptable rating, navigation needs improvement to better serve our older users. It affects the accessibility of information and the empathy we show them, so we aim to elevate it to a higher standard.
Improvement #1: Update Navigation To More Universal Design Patterns
Improvement #2: User Freedom To Choose New Tour Paths at Any Time
Final Prototype
Vanderpal - Your Columbia County Historical Society Companion, Providing Open-Access Education That Keeps History Alive
1) Begin Learning - A quick overview of what the app and CCHS offers
2) Luykas Van Alen Tour Page - Choosing your own educational adventure
3) Intro to the Virtual Tour - Get an overview of your tour to look back on
4) Inside the Best Room Virtual Tour - Immerse yourself in each historic site
1. Proving trustworthiness and credibility in education.
As a small historical society, CCHS has access to primary sources that are unique to its local history. Collaborating with users from foundational research to user testing has shown that museum-goers appreciate historical context that emphasizes transparency and motivates the user to learn more.
2. Facilitating a collaborative environment for the emergence of big ideas.
Facilitating a one-day design sprint with stakeholders highlighted the power of collaboration and quantity during the ideation phase. By working together, we generated a variety of sketches and ideas, which we then voted on to select those that we would take to user testing. This approach proved to be successful after testing analysis.
Vanderpal Next Steps and the Future🔄:
1. Apply for grants.
Fortunately, there are abundant museum technology grants available as donors, local governments, and state governments increasingly support digital experiences to boost tourism. From here, CCHS will work towards seeking out and applying for grants to fund Vanderpal’s development.
2. Get quotes from developers and iterate based on grant funds.
After grant funding has been announced and confirmed, CCHS will contact independent developers and agencies, preferably those specializing in tourism technology, to obtain quotes. From there, I will continue to work with CCHS to iterate on the design and collaborate with development to create an effective app for our budget.
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