The Client
"The City is your museum"
Urban Archive is a technology non-profit with the goal of connecting people, places, and historical institutions of New York City. Their product is a mobile app that draws from over 15 historical museums and institutions throughout New York City to bring their content directly to users, wherever they happen to be in the city.
Their mission:
“TO INSPIRE LEARNING THAT IS ROOTED IN WHAT IS LOCAL — THE ARCHITECTURE, CULTURE, AND UNIQUE STORIES OF NEW YORK CITY.”
My Role
UX Consultant | UX Designer/Writer
Working within a team of four, I worked on every part of the UX process, from research and testing to technical writer and visual designer. My primary responsibilities included user interviews, usability testing of both the current app and our redesigned prototypes, competitor research, persona creation, designer, research document writer and editor, and our primary spec doc writer.
Challenge and Opportunity
Urban Archive approached us with the primary goal of integrating their new museum audio tour feature more seamlessly with the rest of the app. To facilitate this, they gave us latitude to redesign the main app interface in any way we saw fit to improve the overall user experience.
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A redesign of the Urban Archive app would provide users with a seamless and fully integrated street-side AND museum experience, allowing for easier discoverability and a more satisfying user experience as well as greater exposure for smaller-scale New York City museums and their content.
Constraints
Two-and-a-half week sprint, including all research and redesigns.
RESEARCH PHASE
Competitive Feature Analysis
We conducted a feature analysis of four competitors in the museum and exploratory touring sectors.
Key Takeaways:
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Urban Archive already has several features that are standard across the competitive landscape, and even a few that are not ubiquitous.
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There are a few features that Urban Archive does not have which would increase the interactivity and personalized feel of the app, such as the inclusion of video capabilities and a user account system that would allow for user customization.
User Interviews
We spoke with several New York City residents about their exploring and museum-going experiences. We also performed field research at the Museum of the City of New York, where Urban Archive currently provides an audio tour experience for two exhibits (Germ City and Timescapes). We interviewed the Germ City exhibit Curator, the exhibit Educational Curator, and the museum front desk staff to assess the app usage and performance.
Usability Test - Control
To establish a control level of usability, we performed a usability test on the current app with five users who had not used the Urban Archive app before. We provided scenarios and asked them to perform four tasks accordingly. From the results, we gleaned the following insights:
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Labels in the app are consistently unclear
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Users thought the tours were tied to specific groups and organizations
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Parts of the navigation/CTA are hidden and/or too small
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Testers wanted more information on the sites, but were unsure of where to find it in the app
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Testers wanted lists and walks to be further organized for ease of finding activities of interest
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General feeling of wanting a search feature and less purple
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All users were unable to locate museum tours
Problem Statement
After synthesizing all our research, we framed our redesign goals in a single problem statement:
How might we construct a consistent self guided tour experience about the history and evolution of NYC, for people who value exploration as a social activity or solo endeavor?
Personas
To encapsulate our research and ensure that the design work we were to do for the rest of the project reflected what our users actually wanted and needed, we developed two user personas. Our primary persona, Kevin, was used to frame most of our redesign efforts; by keeping him and his goals and needs in mind, we ensured that our work reflected our research.
Kevin represented our primary user, a lone explorer who uses Urban Archive as a fun learning tool when he visits new areas of NYC for work. He wants to discover new information about the city spontaneously and quickly.
Lisa represents a user who chooses to explore and learn about NYC as part of a group activity (which she usually leads). She also uses Urban Archive as a translation tool when her family, who are not native English speakers, come to visit.
DESIGN PHASE
Feature Prioritization
We began by discussing feature ideas and determining which of our ideas we would prioritize. Our MoSCoW Map (Must Have/Should Have/Could Have/Won't Have) represented our final choices: we would include everything in the Must Have category and as much as we could from the Should Have category.
Feature Prioritization Matrix
MoSCoW Map
Design Studio
From our research, we developed a list of ideas we wanted to incorporate in order to solve our users' issues.
Once our features were agreed upon, we ran a design studio to brainstorm and combine design ideas as derived from our research. We each did hand-drawn sketches followed by a group effort to arrive at final designs for both our screens and our task flows for the next round of Usability Tests.
Our team at work sharing hand-sketched ideas
Sketches of the first iteration of our new "Nearby" feature (proceeding right to left)
Sketches of revised task flows for our next round of Usability Testing
Card Sorting
In order to categorize the app's tours and sites into groups that made sense to users, we performed an Open Card Sort to see how our users would naturally group a selection of app items. We asked 7 people to participate and from the results ended up with the following 8 categories:​
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Architecture
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Art, Culture, Sports
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Eats
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Eras
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Museums
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Notable Districts
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Parks & Infrastructure
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Social Movements
Mid-Fidelity Screens
We designed mid-fidelity screens for each task we tested for and created a prototype on which we ran further usability tests. We added the first version of our new "Nearby" feature to display the number of tours, sites, and scavenger hunts within a designated area in this prototype.
Mid-fidelity screens representing our new feature. Users could 1) toggle the nearby mode by tapping the crop button, 2) moved the box to the desired area on the map and hit select, 3) see the available tours, sites, and hunts in that area, and 4) select a category to see those items in a list format.
Usability Testing 2
Our second round of testing indicated our changes were improving usability. However, users were not easily figuring out our new feature, so we took their feedback to make further changes.
High Fidelity Upgrades
We incorporated our improvements to the new feature as we revamped our screens to high fidelity, then tested again. While all our original tasks tested very well, the new feature was improved, but still somewhat confusing to new testers. To fix this, we had it activate automatically when the user reached a certain zoom level. This way we utilized the natural zoom feature of the map view to offer more information to our users.
Final Screens
Tours
Sites
Museums
Random
Nearby
Service Blueprint
To highlight the areas at the Museum of the City of New York that could be improved in terms of increasing user knowledge and use of Urban Archive, we created a Service Blueprint.
Our Service Blueprint and associated Growth Areas. Click either image to enlarge.
User/Task Flows
We created a User Flow as well as Task Flows for all the tasks in our Usability Tests.
User Flow for our redesigned app. Click to enlarge.
Task Flows for each of our Usability Test tasks. Click to enlarge.
Prototype
Note: Unfortunately, due to InVision's closing as of January 1, 2025, a live prototype is no longer available. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Next Steps
​Due to the time constraints on the project, we were unable to run a last round of testing to see how our changes to the new “nearby” feature performed. Other next steps include:​
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Build out and test search feature
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Change museum audio so shorter options or options with greater information are available based on listener preference.
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Clear differentiation between tours and sites visually as well as by definition.
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Consider examining 'profiles' feature that currently exists in the app (profiles of historical figures, such as Robert Moses) and improving discoverability of that feature
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Examine and test improvements for Hunts
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Explore including a link to urban archive content on pictures shared to social media.