Identifying the Problem

The Sheldon Audio Guide project is a UX Design case study I completed as part of Google’s UX Design course. The goal was to create an audio guide app for an art gallery. The Sheldon Museum of Art is a small art museum in Lincoln, Nebraska so I decided to use their museum as an example gallery.

As part of the first steps of the project, I needed to identify pain points users experienced when using Audio Guide apps. As I didn’t have access to many voluntary subjects, I used ChatGPT to model a few user personas and conducted interviews with them to gain insights into the target demographic’s needs and desires for an art gallery audio guide.

Providing a Solution

After creating user stories and problem statements for these representative personas, I conducted a competitive audit and found that customization could be a value proposition that not many competitors were offering. I crafted the app’s goal statement:

Our art gallery audio guide app will let users customize their guide experience by selecting tone and language which will affect gallery visitors by letting them engage with the art in the manner, language, and for as long as they wish. We will measure effectiveness by monitoring the number of app sessions used and the feedback star rating at the end of a guided tour.

Designing the Product

The design for the Sheldon Audio guide started with just some basic sketches on paper, which were then turned into wireframes and finally a low-fidelity prototype in Figma.

After I had a basic working model, I needed to conduct some usability studies to ensure I was tailoring the product to best suit the user’s needs and helping them avoid pain points. I conducted a moderated usability study with 6 friends and family via Zoom that represented a wide range of potential demographics. After analyzing the notes from these studies through a spreadsheet and affinity diagrams, I was able to recognize certain patterns from which I drew several key insights. I created a mock presentation for stakeholders to make recommendations for design iteration.

After making the recommended changes, I shifted my attention to the design elements of the app. I wanted the app to have a subtle, elevated color scheme that provided a lot of negative space to emulate the open spaces found in modern art galleries and museums. I decided on a few fonts that paired well to convey class and emphasized readability and space.

One more round of user testing led me to make a few more adjustments to the layout. This was an unmoderated usability study completed by many of my fellow coursemates in the Coursera Community. From their valuable input, I wrote up a study summary document for stakeholders and presented the following recommendations.

The Handoff

I am very happy with the way the Sheldon Audio Guide turned out, and I was encouraged to hear the resoundingly positive feedback from my professional community on LinkedIn when I shared it, as well as from my Coursera community.

The live prototype can be viewed here:

Reflection

The intentionality, research, and user-centeredness of this project is very reflective of Google’s process and it was a welcome addition to my web development arsenal. In most web development projects I had launched into in the past, design was an evolving idea that led to headaches as I wrote and rewrote front end code to adapt to problems and inspirations that arose along the way.

Seeking feedback from users before and throughout the process allowed me to keep the product focused on providing a solution to their problem, and the product was much better for it.