Culture & Heritage: solving a wicked problem through the process of design thinking

Museums build bridges between objects and people. The purpose of this type of institutions, is to make heritage accessible to everyone.

But, since the 1970s, museums and other public institutions have been suffering from decreasing interest.

So : how might we help museums and other public institutions fulfill their mission of preserving cultural heritage while making it more accessible to a wider audience ?

As we start thinking about this problem, we had a lot of assumptions about the possible causes of people’s disinterest in museums. As we moved forward in our thinking, we quickly identified 3 topics :

• Lack of accessibility — price is too high, perception of snobby, takes a lot of time, crowded, long lines…
• Lack of modernity — not interactive, boring & outdated content, too much informations…
• Locals don’t feel included — not enough renewal, no urgency, no need to go twice, too touristy…

In order to confirm, or not, our assumptions, we first decide to conduct a secondary research.
We saw that some of our suppositions were completely wrong. For example, our main concern was that ticket price was too high, so people can’t afford it and prefer to spend money on other forms of leisure.
But as our research progressed, we found the results of various museum experiments with free admission. The result : a noticeable drop in attendance (for example, the Smithsonian removed entrance fee & saw a 7% decrease in attendance).

On the other hand, data and numerous articles have confirmed other of our thoughts, such as the lack of interactivity, the dense and outdated content, and therefore the lack of interest of a young population.

To go further in understanding the problem, we decided to interview 5 users.
Our target: people between 20 to 35, who consider culture to be a major part of their lives today (they like to go to the movies, theater, concert, to discover new places), who have been to a museum but haven’t been in the last 12 months, mix of ethnicities, gender and socio-economic levels.

Users feedbacks allow us to complete our CSD matrix and highlighted key pain points. Surprisingly, people who interviewed had a lot to share about museums and a lot of ideas about culture should be presented today.

As we start to organize our Users Research into our Affinity Diagram, 3 popular topics emerge and we were able to have more clarity on where was the majority of the negative points:

• Physical perception: lack of accessibility, long lines & crowded, cold & quiet ambiance, too much walking
• Content in museum: lack of newness, too much information, content is not relevant, preference for facts & history
• Experience: looking for emotions, immersive & interactive, museum is a social activity

Meet Laura, the Social Urban Millennial, our persona who love living in a big metropolitan city in Europe because there’s always something going on. When she’s not at work, she’ll probably be found grabbing a beer with some friends or maybe catching the latest movie at the cinema or at a concert. She loves discovering a culture via their food. Actually, museums are not top of mind for her, but she won’t say « no » if a friend invites her.

She find museums can be overwhelming, that art blends together and she usually don’t end up remembering anything after her visit.

Laura’s motivation ? Spend time with friends. Her goal ? Entertaining herself.

We can see 2 spots where Laura’s visit becomes unpleasant: her experience is impacted. She will surely not want to repeat it.

To tackle this problem, we decided to focus on the point where we had the most negative feedbacks from our users.

At the time of the ideation process, we come up with a lot of ideas. Some were directly given by our 5 interviewees.

Once again, when we start to group similar ideas together, 3 clear topic where potential solutions are, emerge :

• You select the topic
• Friends & social
• You set the time

We decide to combined these into one product that will help us solve the problem :
An app to create customized museum visits based on the users interests & how long they want to spend in the museum.

The goal: make museum visits a more personalized & memorable experience for visitors, therefore increasing museum traffic.

To test our concept, we found 5 potential users of our solution based on our persona.

The scenario: “Imagine one of your friend want to go to a museum, you are not really happy but you just saw an add for a cool new App on IG, so you say Hum let’s go!”

Here is what come up from our testing :

• The social media function of this app doesn’t interest users: they won’t link it to their social media accounts and they won’t share their tour experiences publicly or with their community
• They want a news feed with content based on their interests & location
• They want to have tours options to choose from
• They want to be able to purchase tickets on the app

We decide to go back on the drawing board to revised our prototype:

• Optimize the news feed
  Conduct user interviews to understand how this feature could be useful to users
• Investigate ticket purchase feature
  Develop a prototype & conduct concept testing for an integrated ‘buy ticket’ feature in the app
• Quantitative survey
  To confirm that the concept is interesting and useful for a majority of our target

The complexity of the problem could surely be solved by many solutions. Based on our research, we found that the heart of the problem lies in today user’s need for personalized experiences.

As marketing proves: personalized content is an extremely powerful lever to create user desire.

Today, museums are perceived as offering outdated content, as well as a boring and exhausting visit. By focusing on the personal customization, museums ensure to modernize their image in order to attract more visitors by offering them an experience that’s really fits their needs and interests.