Museum Booking App

Role

UX / UI Designer

Industry

Cultural & Arts

Duration

6 months (Part time)

The brief

This was a project from my Coursera UX Design course, chosen from a shortlist of ten briefs. I picked it because the problem felt genuinely underserved. Museum apps tend to focus on in-venue navigation but rarely address the planning friction that happens before you arrive.

What the research showed

Research with museum visitors identified four consistent pain points. Crowd unpredictability was the biggest. Arriving somewhere unexpectedly busy is frustrating enough to put people off going at all, particularly families. Limited exhibition information made it hard to judge whether a visit would be worthwhile before committing. Users wanted enough context to make an informed decision, not just a title and a date. Ticket availability and timing were linked. Users wanted to know not just whether a slot was available, but whether it would be busy. The theme across all four was the same: uncertainty before arrival. The design needed to remove it.

The design decisions

The interactive map includes a quick-bar for filtering facilities: toilets, cafes, accessible routes. For families and visitors with accessibility needs, this removes a common source of mid-visit stress. Exhibition pages surface crowd forecasts, reviews, and booking together. The information needed to make a decision sits in one place rather than across multiple screens. Accessibility ran through the whole design. Contrast ratios, font sizing, touch targets, and layout hierarchy were treated as core requirements, not additions at the end.

Density calendar

The original brief included a live density tracker showing real-time crowd levels. Research revealed that wasn't where the problem sat. Users didn't want to know how busy it was right now. They wanted to know how busy it would be when they were planning to book. Crowd information is only useful when you can still act on it. So the density data moved into the booking flow. Visitors see crowd forecasts at the point of choosing a time slot, which is when it actually helps.

Testing

Prototype testing revealed one gap in the post-booking experience. Once users purchased tickets, there was no easy way to access them without navigating back through the app. That led to adding mobile wallet integration. Tickets go directly to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet at purchase. Small addition, but it closes a genuine gap at the end of the flow.