When Art meets Technology: enhancing the museum experience through a mobile app
Reimagining how visitors interact with KMSKA’s collection.
the challenge
Reimagining the visitor experience
Having been closed for 11 years, KMSKA was keen to make a fantastic first impression when it reopened. Digital technology has come on leaps and bounds since they were last open. So, we set about helping KMSKA bring their collection to life, building a mobile app & using digital touchpoints to create an engaging, unforgettable visitor experience.
- Project
- Mobile app, digital signage, and CMS
- Deliverables
- User research & testing, UX, UI, CraftCMS
Museums traditionally rely on wayfinding, brochures, and audio guides to bring their collections to life. However, these strategies are far from perfect. They’re not that entertaining or accessible, and they’re limited in scope.
KMSKA was convinced there must be a better way to engage visitors — so they came to us for help. Enter KMSKA's mobile app.
Why we decided to build a mobile app, using web technology
KMSKA's goal was to provide an inclusive, accessible, and personalised experience. Therefore, we decided to create a mobile app. The app blended the best of both worlds. It would allow the museum to share must-know details on the artwork and its context — but it would also ensure everyone could access this information equally. We decided to build a web app using existing patterns for three main reasons.
Digital signage displays throughout the museum
The app was a great tool — but a great customer experience is much more than a single mobile application. KMSKA also didn’t want visitors to have to be glued to their phones while walking around the museum. The solution? Creating digital signage that would guide visitors through the galleries.
We built a Vue.js 3 application that allowed KMSKA to manage all screens from an open-source XIBO. The screens demonstrated the right information to the visitors at the right time, connecting the digital to the physical. They acted as extensions of the app, offering additional guidance to further enhance the visitors’ experience.
Centrally managing the museum’s content across multiple digital channels
Last but not least, KMSKA needed a way to power both the app and the digital signage from a single place. Enter: custom CMS. We build a headless CMS using graphQL to provide us with an API, with both the app and the screens using this API to pull in the same content.
Not only did this benefit visitors, but it also made life easier for KMSKA’s employees — after all, they’re the ones who actually use this CMS. This was vitally important. It's impossible to provide an outstanding customer experience if you have a poor employee experience.
We integrated the custom CMS with Datahub, the internal database of all the artwork displayed in the museum. The information from Datahub was synced continuously with our CMS, acting as a single source of truth to manage all external displays.
