Virtourium is a website designed to allow users to view virtual tours from museums and other educational institutions, while allowing museums to manage these tours and add a source of revenue or donations.
I was responsible for this project's discovery & research, information architecture, branding, and usability testing.
In 2020, a global pandemic (Covid-19) reduced and in many circumstances eliminated tourism. Especially hard hit were museums, and other educational tourist destinations. As shutdowns, went from two weeks to indefinitely many institutions, especially those who are not government funded, have struggled to wait out their hiatus or have sadly had to make the decision to close their doors to the public for good. Additionally even when these institutions are open to the public there are many people who do not have the means or the income to travel to these locations. I wanted to fix that!
I found two audiences for this product:
For the purposes of this project I focused on the general museum enthusiast audience because those who are educators or researchers have more needs and at its core the goal of this project is to just provide a enjoyable learning experience for viewers and a way to accrue donations for museums.
I created a website that will allow institutions to reach audiences that are unable to come to the museum, generate museum revenue, and provide a consistent viewing experience for audiences.
Google forms were utilized to collect data from potential users. The focus of this survey was to learn what made a tour great!
Survey results showed that our potential users showed:
In a virtual space, users want or need:
In a virtual space users dislike:
As part of our research:
During competitive analysis I determined that google was our biggest competitor. Google is the largest and most recognizable entity in the virtual tour space. However their threat may be limited as this currently is a project of Google and doesn't seem to be at the front of the companies goals.
The following competitors are not direct competitors but rather companies that have the software to create virtual tours. Depending on how you enter the market - I could make an ally out of these companies asking for use of their software OR I could challenge them and design my own software.
This company has designed a camera and system that can be used to design 360 degree tours. It was designed for ease of use and many of their partners are reality groups, who use their system to create house tours.
Based on the target audience and survey I focused on Laura Forest.
"Creating art that brings a smile to others is my passion."
- Learning & gathering inspiration
- Being a creative & artistic
- Sharing/sparking joy through art
- Also likes to explore different histories and cultures - general museum enthusiast
- Spread joy through her artwork
- Become a traditional studio artist
- Constantly improve her skills and find her own style
- As a student she’s typically limited to the museums in her area
- Due to COVID-19 she can’t go even if she wants to
- I can be expensive to travel to museums that are far away even when there isn’t a pandemic
- Finding & discovering virtual tours that are helpful to building her skills is difficult
The following user stories are based off of the problem statements and how it might affect users.
As a parent I want to find engaging educational material online so that my kids aren't playing video games all day.
As a college art student I want to visit art museums so that I can gather art inspiration and study art history.
As a teacher I want to find resources so that I can use them for my next history unit.
These two user flows were my first iterations. After careful consideration of necessary features and flow - I determined that these flows were not in scope for the project. If the scope were larger for this project I would have included these top two user flows.
I decided that the best course of action would be to use this last flow as it was the simplest of the flows I created to implement for the scope of the project.
For my wireframe sketches I was focused on find the right design for the homepage and its necessary elements. By focusing my energy on creating the homepage, I was able to use its set-up as a guide for subsequent pages.
All members of our team contributed sketches based on our sitemap. We then discussed sketches as a team and voted on concepts and designs we wanted to move forward.
For our moderated testing, I created a research plan for interviewing users
During our usability testing I asked testers to complete the following tasks:
“ I really like the idea and it's fairly straightforward, but I think that the tours page needs more. I want to read about each artifact and would like to see close captions included. “ - Participant
Inspiration for this design came from the Nyansapo Wisdom Knot. Colors were inspired by ancient cave painting.
We made a paper prototype to experiment with new ideas, which allowed us to try out several iterations quickly before committing to a prototype.
For this website, I've found that paying attention to the patterns of museums, and making it feel like a museum were really important. I learned that people really want the feel of a museum and that museums are very much about environment.
The biggest challenged I faced with this project is that its something that I very passionate about. Those feelings can get in the way and I really had to push myself to detach from it enough to understand what it would look like. I also realized that spending too much time on your wireframes can hinder progress.
I would really love to continue building out this idea. Realistically though this probably needs to start out as a blog or as a place to feature existing tours and build my way up to a business model that allows me to host and produce digital tours to add to the website.
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