Discovery & concept for a historic site
Project Brief
A major historical site in Texas was looking to expand its digital strategy.
Their goal was to faciliate visitor orientation, enrich historical understanding, and foster engagement with the site’s stories, ensuring that guests leave with a valuable and memorable experience.
Client: NDA client
User Research: Stakeholder interviews, field research, personas development
Concept Development & Design: Preliminary application map, content strategy, concept sketches and designs, participant concept testing sessions
Summary
Our team kicked off a 4-month discovery and concepting initiative to detemine how a mobile app could elevate and enhance the visitor experience.
Collaborating with a top creative agency, I led the discovery and concept design phases for the digital experience. I collaborated with producers, creative directors, subject matter experts (SMEs), and developers to outline insights and recommendations for a mobile app for the site.
Design Process
- Conducted extensive stakeholder interviews
- Defined visitor personas to align team on target audience and their motivations for visiting
- Conducted on-site field research
- Identified opportunity areas through observation of visitor behavior, staff services, and interpretive content
- Identified visitor pain points and challenges
- Mapped overall concepts for a digital strategy with key digital experiences of the mobile application via sketches and low-fi designs
- Conducted 60-minute one-on-one concept testing with participants. Guided participants through onscreen representation of creative concepts. Test sessions were conducted remotely over Zoom and were recorded for further analysis
Sample Documentation
Visitor personas
We developed 6 unique visitor personas, identifying needs, motivations, goals, and current challenges that visitors face during their visit to the site.
The personas were meant to feel like real visitors with realistic behaviors and perspectives. Their purpose was to help the team evaluate future design ideas through the lens of real-world people and scenarios.
Visitor Motivations
After interviews, field research, and holistic research into museum visitors, we grouped the visitor motivations into 6 distinct categories. This helped team members understand why visitors come to the site, and what kind of digital experiences they would find valuable during their visit.
Concept Development
During this phase, we crafted a creative concept deck tailored for a site-wide outdoor mobile visitor experience, focusing on enhancing user engagement and understanding.
To assess the concept’s effectiveness and viability, we conducted one-on-one concept tests with participants. Insights and recommendations were extracted from these sessions and presented to the end client. This insights helped refine the app’s design and strategy in order to move into the final design and development phase of the project.