Art Tours IC

Audio Tour Mobile App

Project Goals

Art Tours IC is an attempt to give form and access to information about the many public art installations throughout Iowa City, IA, while keeping each in its historical context. Unlike a traditional audio or walking tour, it needed to be flexible enough so users could spend as little or as much time with the app in any one go.

Who We Serve

Visitors to Iowa City often only have a short time in the city, but because they typically make return trips, there's an opportunity to provide them with a more grounded sense of their surroundings. Local arts enthusiasts serve to benefit as well from knowing more about the place they call home.

Who Am I

I served as a UX designer creating the visual design and feature set from concept to delivery. This process included the creation of both low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes as well as user testing for each.

Key Challenges

Our first consideration was how to create a fun and engaging experience, through partial gamification, so that people could use the app to enhance their experience of the city, rather than feel like they were listening to a series of lectures, while being dragged from one place to the next.
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We also needed to provide clear wayfinding, while still allowing the user a degree of choice in where they go and the time they take to complete the individual courses. The courses need to be constructed in such a way, then, that movement from one point to the next was accessible, especially for those with mobility concerns.
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Last, it was important to us to represent a diverse range of subjects from many different periods in the city's history.

Audio Tours and the Core User

Audio tours are most closely associated with museums, art museums in particular, while walking tours typically take the form of local history. It's still uncommon to see a combination of the two, so there was an opportunity to provide a unique experience with the app.

Preliminary research showed that time was a major concern for many users. There is an underserved market of young people in particular who would like to be more involved in the local arts scene but lack the kinds of opportunities best suited to their busy schedules.

Design

Based on our research, we decided, initially, that the map should be the app's focus, so that users could spy something nearby when they were already out and play a short audio clip relative to it. This lacked the structure we were looking for, though, and it became clear from user testing that this approach was somewhat haphazard and that users didn't feel like they had clear choices in where to go and what to learn. So, we made the courses more like a menu, where you can, of course, still visit individual sites, like individual dishes, but you can also opt for a complete "meal" in the form of a carefully thought out series.

Initial Concept

Following the logic of "fitting into a busy schedule," it seemed best to opt for a design where the user could simply dive in to any audio tour sites nearby. This would minimize the time it took to get into the app and get going. At this point, the idea of pre-selected courses was still a secondary concern, so it occupied a less important position in the visually hierarchy of the app's landing page.

Wireframes

It became apparent almost immediately, however, that a map-centric approach diminished user choice and interactivity and left much of the app's functionality and appeal up to chance. So, we pivoted toward a more course-centric approach to give users a sense of accomplishment as they visited various locations. The ability to "dive right in" remained, but it was now secondary to a more structured and historical framing for the audio tour clips.

User Testing

From our usability study, we were quite pleased to find our users were having a fun time using the app and were generally approaching it with a playful attitude. However, several users found navigation through the app to be somewhat difficult and were unclear what some elements were even for, like the persistent footer navigation bar we had originally conceptualized. We had originally wanted the app to be many things for many different people, but it became clear the integration of the map and courses needed to be our main focus.

Final Design

Based on our usability studies, we streamlined the interface so as to highlight the app's core features of the courses and audio clip pop-ups on the map. Colors were chosen to maximize visibility in bright daylight conditions, and all text and typography were chosen for high contrast, so as to assure the app would be accessible to a wide variety of users. Because the user will typically be navigating the built environment as they use the app, it was key that it have an "at a glance" feel. We wanted the user to be able to go back and forth easily between the app and the public art sites we want to draw their attention to.

Conclusion

Art Tours IC was a reminder of one of the most important and often hardest lessons to learn: really focus on your user's needs, even if that means completely reconceptualizing your approach. Our initial approach was too disorienting, and in further iterating on the design, we realized the importance of implementing a clear structure for the various audio clip locations in the form of courses and a points-based system, so users could track their progress. At the same time, it became clear in further user testing that some streamlining and clean up the interface was in order. Art Tours IC should be a compliment to exploring the city, not an impediment imposing its vision on what people want to see and know.
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Art Tours IC is modular in form, so new courses can be added as needed. This will, of course, require further research into the history of the arts in Iowa City, the composition of scripts for new clips, and recording those clips for implementation in the app. We would also like to develop a wider range of wayfinding cues, for instance making use of a phone's vibration functionality, so that users can be alerted to when they need to turn their attention to the app without having to constantly glance at the screen.
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If you want to know more about the project,you can read the full case study here.