Designing for discovery-driven museum exploration.
Visual Design
Usability Testing
Prototyping & Interaction
FigJam
MS Teams
Navigating large museum spaces can feel overwhelming, leaving many visitors unsure where to start.
Visitors report stress, confusion, and disengagement when information is hard to find or navigation feels difficult.
Museums are meant for exploration but without the proper guidance can quickly turn into overload.
What if there was a more thoughtful way to guide visitors to what they want to see, within the time they have? Designing a discovery-driven navigation experience for casual museum visitors, especially for those who struggle to navigate large spaces or have limited time.
MUSE reimagines the museum visit as a personalized and archivable journey, one that adapts to your time, interests, and energy.
Curated Routes
Routes are dynamically generated based on user preferences such as interests, mood, and available time, turning each visit into a personalized journey.
Smart Filtering
Users can search and filter routes by duration, theme, or proximity via map view, making it easy to find the right experience in the moment.
Visitors can scan artworks to unlock deeper context and save pieces for later, creating a digital highlight reel of their visit to revisit anytime.
A 0→1 mobile experience developed over the span of 3 months.* The work spanned from early-stage market research & product strategy, prototyping, usability testing, and iterative refinement based on user feedback.
*While this project involved collaboration in the research and testing phases, this case study focuses on my personal contributions and design decisions.
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Journey Mapping
User Flow
→
Wireframes
→
Visual Design
Final Prototype
What are visitors hoping to experience during a museum visit? What challenges disrupt their experience?
To better understand the tools available to visitors, I evaluated existing museum and discovery platforms alongside user research to identify key navigation and discovery challenges.
Looking at what’s out there already...
I conducted 2 out of 8 semi-structured interviews to gain deeper insights into the journey of casual museum visitors.
Both participants noted habits of visiting museums a few times per year and preference for flexible, self-paced exploration.
Cognitive Overload
“The thing with museums is like they’re too overwhelming... they’re too large and like, there's so many topics that they cover”Open Exploration
“I just wander around. I don’t really like to follow a pattern. I like to just wander and see where my curiosity takes me.”Temporal Pressure
“Sometimes I get really stressed when a museum is closing and I can’t figure out how to leave… I panic.”Taking these insights, we mapped them into key themes to uncover patterns in visitor needs, behaviours, and pain points.
We used a series of HMW questions to reframe challenges as opportunities. These helped guide ideation toward solutions that were grounded in actual visitor frustrations.
Bringing together insights from the research,
I broke down the challenges of the visitor journey into 3 key design opportunities.
Lightweight Guidance
Simplifying interactions to support discovery while keeping attention on the physical space.Contextual Navigation
Effortless navigation that adapts to where visitors are and what they care about.Digestible Context
Short, visual, and digestible context that complements open exploration.LONG STORY SHORT,
Creating a light companion that suggests personalized routes, prioritizing simplicity, clarity, and low-distraction interactions.
To define our target user, I created the following persona.
Synthesized from research insights, this persona helped narrow our focus and guide key design decisions.
To better understand where support would matter most, I mapped Ivy’s experience from planning to completing her visit.
The journey map revealed that the most critical intervention point occurs upon arrival, where overwhelm and time constraints peak. It also reinforced the need for lightweight interactions that enhance, not interrupt, exploration.
Building on research synthesis, I developed a user task flow to map the primary actions and decision points across the experience.
Prioritizing features was the most challenging part of this phase. We evaluated tradeoffs to identify the path that delivered the most value with minimal complexity, ultimately focusing on a clear “golden path” for users.
Before jumping into Figma, I shared sketches to test early concepts for each step in the flow.
These sketches helped visualize key interactions and quickly iterate on how the golden path could feel in use.
Guided by the user flow and sketches, we developed mid-fidelity wireframes focused on prototyping core interactions.
This allowed for system consistency and rapid iteration as we prepared an initial prototype for usability testing.
USABILITY TESTING
I moderated 2 out of 8 usability tests gathering direct feedback on how users moved through the core flow.