The goal of this project is to investigate the museum in the service design perspective, help museum organizers and operators better understand museum visitors, their needs and pain points, and how to possibly improve the experience of the museum visitors.
User Researcher
Problem definition, contextual interview, structured observation, thematic analysis, qualitative analysis
The field study was conducted in two groups of two researchers. We mainly interviewed and observed museum visitors. We went to different floors and exhibitions and ask people’s opinions about their experience. I also tried to follow some visitors to go together with them and not intrude in their choice of where to go next.
Based on our research, we found the museum visitors can be categorized in three user groups: Tourists, Parents with Kids and Senior Citizens.
We decided to work further with the Parents with Kids group. From our research, we found their routes of visiting are closely linked to their children's age.
For our Parent persona Lotta Saarinen, we want to consider the more complex scenarios, to visit with children before school age and babies. Below is the customer journey of her visit, showing her taking care of her children, her problems and satisfaction during the visit.
Apart from the parent visitors, we conducted thematic analysis to group all the interviews under certain themes. The findings can be shown in the following affinity diagram, with positive points color coded in green, negative in red, and neutral in white.
The direct stakeholders include visitors of the museum and employees and managers of the museum. For visitors, associated parties are e.g. travel agencies (the tourist agencies and guides, according to interviews, recommend the museum to the tourists). Also the employer, namely, the city of Helsinki as the owner, is a key stakeholder to the museum.
Below stakeholders from the city of Helsinki and the associations affiliated with the museum were mostly collected from the website of Helsinki City Museum.
The visitor interests are rather self-explanatory and the results are clear from the interviews, as shown in personas.
For the city, the main drive for having the museum is not about directly creating revenue, as visiting the museum is always free. The benefits of the city are more indirect and come from improving the city brand and attractiveness. The atmosphere in the museum could be described as “the living room of Helsinki”.
The drive for commercial stakeholders in tourism are also quite self-explanatory: the tourism businesses involved with the city are mainly interested in generating revenue.
The associations and voluntary workers affiliated with the museum work for the common good: their core interests are in developing and getting involved with creating the enjoyable atmosphere in the museum.