The art of not getting lost — a new approach to wayfinding in a labyrinth of a museum
In the summer of 2018, a large Swiss museum asked us to redesign their app. The first and most obvious requirement was that visitors should be able to use the app as an audio guide. But their second challenge seemed way more interesting.
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Since the museum was remodeled in 2016 and a new wing was added, visitors had a hard time finding their way around the building. The true story of a Spanish family that could not find their way out of the museum for two hours (apparently being too shy to ask one of the numerous guides) was especially striking.
I must admit, after having lived in Zurich for almost 10 years, I had never explored the Swiss National Museum beyond a single photo exhibition and the bistro. To immerse ourselves in the experience of getting lost, two dreipol designers and I entered its labyrinth.
Meet the labyrinth
Several factors made navigation in the building challenging. The complex layout and sheer size of the museum made it hard for us to figure out where we were at any given moment. The new wing closed the loop of the originally open L-shaped layout, enabling us to walk in a circle. However, to complete the roundtrip, we were required to change floors several times, for reasons apparent only once we saw the building from the outside. The museum decided not to go with the most obvious solution of making their physical signage system more noticeable — they were afraid this would make it uglier.
Now and then we would come across a beautifully crafted piece of metal that was supposed to tell us where in the building we were standing. At my third encounter with the metal cutout, I realized that it was an abstract representation of the museum’s layout. It was at this moment we had discovered our potential for improvement.
We presented our design proposal with the polemic title:
«The museum’s map should be as three dimensional as the museum itself.»
We assumed that most visitors were not able to connect the abstract metal shape on the wall with the museum’s floor plan. However, we were convinced that people would recognize the rough shape of this iconic building when viewed from above. Therefore, adding a third dimension and a roofscape to the map, visitors would finally understand where in the museum they were located.
Our original plan was to use NFC beacons to locate visitors and display their location on an interactive 3D map. We also planned to notify visitors when their path was forking. When pitching the idea to the museum’s stakeholders they fell in love with the concept. Our work here was done — so we thought.
The interactive 3D map died a quick and premature death once it met the budget constraints. But even before we realized that we needed to look for a more cost-effective navigation solution, I stumbled upon an alternative……
The birth of «hyperlapse navigation»
Apart from working at dreipol, I also lecture at the Zurich University of the Arts — probably one of the few buildings in Zurich with an even more confusing layout than the National Museum. Whenever I invite guest speakers to my courses, I have to pick them up at the entrance because they very often cannot find their way to the seminar rooms on their own. On one occasion I knew I wouldn’t have time to pick up my guest lecturer and had to think of an alternative way of guiding her to my seminar room. I used my phone’s time-lapse function to film the way from the entrance to the classroom and sent it to her before she arrived. Seeing how well that worked, it dawned on me that this might also be a suitable way to guide visitors through a museum.
This epiphany marked the birth of our «hyperlapse navigation».
Wikipedia: Hyperlapse (also walklapse, spacelapse, stop-motion time-lapse, moving timelapse) is a technique in time-lapse photography that allows the photographer to create motion shots. In its simplest form, a hyperlapse is achieved by manually moving the camera a short distance between each shot. The first film using the hyperlapse technique dates to 1995.
All that was left to solve was: How might we provide the very diverse visitors of the National Museum with an easy way to control the hyperlapse video, whilst also showing supporting information?
Challenging users
What do I mean by «very diverse visitors»? The easiest group to design digital products for are the digitally savvy users of one’s own age group and cultural background. Preferably the ones that constantly use your product. Unfortunately, the museum is devoid of European men in their thirties engrossed in their phones. Instead, it is filled with tourists from all over the world, elderly people and groups of school children. Only very few of them visit the museum and use the app regularly. Therefore, we were looking for a very self-explanatory functional pattern.
We used the already existing «navigation tiles» from our initial concept that were inspired by the layout of Amsterdam’s Rijks Musem App. Making them horizontally scrollable and connecting their Y-scroll position with the hyperlapse video’s timeline turns them into a precise and simple controller. Now visitors could swipe from one navigation tile to the next while having the corresponding wayfinding video playing fullscreen.
45 well-invested minutes
With a quick and dirty mockup that took all of 45 minutes to build, we could immediately find out how the interaction felt, test it on users, and were able to communicate the idea to our clients. In a meeting with the museum’s stakeholders that was meant to show how a bastardized version of our original fully interactive 3D map could have looked like, we presented the hyperlapse navigation instead.
The museum’s stakeholders were quick to forget the 3D map that they had loved so much in the beginning. The new solution seemed easier to use, easier to build and easier to test with users. The fact that the museum employed videographers and editors helped tip the scales in favor of this change in concept.
People unlike myself
At this stage, we had successfully proven that the navigation concept was well perceived by middle-aged European men. Now it was time to put our idea to the test with users that didn’t fit this description. With a list of assumptions, a clipboard and a mockup on my iPhone, I went to the museum and looked for subjects that were most unlike myself.
When testing it pays off to focus at first on the assumptions that pose the largest risk and hold the most uncertainty. Though we tested the onboarding process and the menu structure, we mainly focused on testing the hyperlapse navigation. This was the most crucial part of the app and the least established functional pattern.
Findings
We learned that not everyone understood the horizontal scroll of the navigation tiles straightaway. This led us to add a visual indication when introducing the wayfinding functionality. We introduced a little horizontal wiggle to the scrollable navigation tiles, which triggered the corresponding movement in the wayfinding video’s timeline. This would prompt users to explore the scrolling functionality intuitively. We also observed that some users kept tapping on the wayfinding icons on the navigation tiles instead of swiping. By inverting the icons and removing the fill on the circular background, we reduced their «call to action» appearance.
One thing that all our test subjects had in common — once they figured out the tiles were scrollable — is that they found it delightfully easy to follow the prompted path. Some even seemed amused that I was testing this seemingly self-explanatory wayfinding concept at all.
Insights that keep on giving
The app was released in the spring of 2019 with the reopening of the museum’s permanent exhibition on Swiss history. Knowing so much more about this amazing and complex museum, I have now become a more regular visitor. I enjoy using the app myself and observing other visitors closely whilst collecting insights for the next app update.
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