AR Explorer
AR app for enhancing museum visiting experience
AR Explorer is an app with AR technology that aims to enhance small museums' popularity, to be used by tourists and local people. Also, it offers visitors a more interactive and engaging experience.
ROLES
User Experience Design
User Research
User Interview
AR Prototyping
Usability Test
TEAM
Individual Work
DURATION
5 Weeks
Personal Project @ SVA
00
SNEAK PEEK
The AR Explorer is an innovative application designed to enhance visitor experiences in small museums through augmented reality (AR). Using the Tenement Museum as a model, the app demonstrates how AR can engage younger audiences, encourage social media sharing, and ultimately increase museum foot traffic and popularity.
01
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The AR Explorer project began from a professor's proposal to connect digital and physical spaces for local businesses. As a museum enthusiast exploring New York City, I noticed that smaller museums have fewer visitors compared to famous ones like the Metropolitan Museum. They suffer from lower visitor rates due to their limited collections. The AR Explorer uses augmented reality to enhance these smaller museums and attract more visitors.
02
PROBLEM
How might we enhance the visitors’ experience to let them be willing to share on social media?
03
DISCOVERY
Why for Tenement Museum? Why for small museums in the US?
What is the Tenement Museum?
The Tenement Museum, a national historic site in Manhattan's Lower East Side, is located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street. Its two buildings housed around 15,000 people from over 20 nations between 1863 and 2011.
What people can experience?
Tour guides lead visitors through the tenements, sharing immigrants’ family stories to provide an immersive and insightful experience.
What is the Tenement Museum’s mission?
The Tenement Museum aims to build an inclusive American identity and help people understand America's essence. The immigrants’ hard work was crucial in building the city and nation.
An overview of U.S. Museums
According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), there are 35,144 museums in the United States, but only 70 are large national museums. The majority are small to medium-sized and often face promotion and operational challenges, with some at risk of closure.
04
DEEPER INSIGHTS
I conducted graffiti wall research with 14 participants, asking six questions. All participants expressed a wish to visit big museums to see more exhibits. However, given the small museum's limited space, the challenge is to create richer and more engaging content to attract visitors.
What experiences do people prefer in museums? How can we improve the Tenement Museum experience?
What is the current user journey?
Using the shadowing research method, I observed and visited the Tenement Museum twice. My contextual research identified three areas for improvement: increasing interactivity to engage younger visitors (currently, 80% are over 45), offering multilingual support for international tourists, and making the endpoint of the visit more impactful and memorable.
User interview
The user interviews were conducted with six people. Three of them are other visitors in the same visiting group with me, and the other three are my peers, around 20 - 30, who are my target audience in this project.
Findings
Most of the seniors are satisfied with the overall experience but the museum doesn’t attract youth
Potential young visitors may lose interest when they see the old building
Most people don’t know the existence of the museum
Pain points
The museum needs more effective publicity
The experience needs to be more engaging and interactive to attract youth
Needs
05
DESIGN
Persona
The product is targeting youth around 18 to 35 years old to attract them to visit the museum.
Storyboards
Information architecture
Wireframes & user flow
I used Adobe Aero to build the prototype and invited visitors and museum staff to test these prototypes.
AR prototyping
Design system
06
PROTOTYPE
AR Navigation
Using AR techniques and GPS to navigate people finding nearby tourist spots.
AR Character
Bring history characters into real-life scenes through the AR function.
AR Photo
Take photos with virtual characters before favorite scenes.
Try The Prototype :)
07
USABILITY TEST
Feedback from the Tenement Museum’s Vice President
I conducted an interview and a usability test with Tenement Museum’s Vice President, Jamie Salen, and got meaningful feedback from her stakeholder’s perspective.
"It's exciting to include historical characters in AR scenes, but be mindful of placing them in modern settings. Managing avatars of real people is sensitive work; we want to ensure they're used respectfully and accurately to prevent misinformation."
08
REFLECTION
After my interview and feedback session with Jamie, I realized that the Tenement Museum's actual operations differ from what I had initially understood through my research.
The museum values its tradition of using tour guides to share the stories of the tenements, and they don’t want to change that. This made me think about how technology and human interaction work together. Sometimes, we try to do everything with technology and forget the importance of human connections. Our product can help tour guides by giving visitors more immersive experiences and breaking down language barriers, but it shouldn’t replace the guides.
Enhancing Human Connections with Technology
I also need to improve the avatars so they accurately match the historical periods they represent.
Creating More Accurate Avatars
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