DIGITAL & STRATEGIC
UX DESIGN PRACTICE
STRATEGIC DESIGN
An Experience Strategy for the 21st Century Museum
A strategic approach to technology and organisational practice to enable the V&A signature to emerge.
The V&A must develop a sophisticated understanding of user experience, in order to grasp new opportunities and consolidate its position as an innovator. In devising and deploying new experiences there are new practices to develop, ensuring the organisation can effectively produce rich diversity from sharper operations, can generate unbridled creativity from a resilient platform. The new buildings in East London present a rare opportunity to invent, yet this moment could transform the entire organisation. New experiences, on a new platform, in new buildings.
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Arup's Studio team delivered a comprehensive user experience strategy for the V&A, comprising a user experience framework, a platform, and 14 experience concept designs. This was informed by insights from stakeholder interviews, observational research with museum visitors, and ethnographic studies of staff. The outcomes included a platform-based approach to user experience, identification of key intervention opportunities, and the development of both general and site-specific concepts to enhance the visitor experience across all V&A locations, including tailored solutions for V&A East.
The project intrinsically demonstrated a user-led approach by conducting light-touch user research, as well as in-house stakeholder research. These interviews and workshops were well-attended and well-received, ultimately generating a set of useful core insights for the V&A's experience strategy. These were rapidly turned into high-level concept designs for the kind of interventions a subtly transformedV&A could be built around. These user experience concept designs form one of the primary outputs of the project, providing a clear articulation of a signature user experience for the V&A, as well as capable of being rapidly developed as part of the V&A's building programme, particularly in the new East London buildings, but also across the entire V&A group of core institutions and linked partnerships.
Arup Digital Studio was commissioned by the V&A to produce a user experience strategy for the organisation, with an initial focus on V&A East. This work grew from a conversation about a digital strategy, with insights for the new buildings in the east; it quickly became clear that an over-arching user experience approach would be more beneficial to the V&A.
Taking a design-led approach, the Arup team conducted initial user research to uncover insights into how the user experience of the V&A might be understood, framed and developed. These insights stimulated concept designs for user experiences that will unlock new interactions for visitors, staff and partners, move the organisation's practice forwards, and creatively inform the new building projects. A user experience framework has been produced which helps map these concepts across various corners of the V&A's expansive territory, ensuring a signature experience can emerge whilst also affording diversity at the edges.
Co-developed with V&A teams in workshops, the concept designs manifest some next generation digital/physical user experiences which could nonetheless be delivered near term. A new platform strategy has been sketched out, which ensures that any prototyping of the concepts across the V&A group, or further design development as part of the V&A East architecture projects, is manageable, effective, scalable and can deliver across the organisation.
It is a way of devising and delivering diverse, inventive touchpoints for particular local contexts, whilst also ensuring that digital capacity is being nurtured and refined across the organisation. It is thus both about curatorial practice and data-driven platforms, about new touchpoints and more effective operations. Accordingly, it should be implemented via the rare opportunity that V&A East provides, as well as by progressing fundamentally important digital infrastructure projects, linking both front-of-house and back-of-house innovation via a focus on new user experiences. One cannot happen without the other.
Project Highlights
User experience framework
By exploring, articulating and enhancing this layer of user experience, we can deliver a range of experiences on the spectrum between museum and park, between formal and informal, defined and open, established and innovative. Pulling these experiences together will require a more sophisticated approach to back-of-house across the V&A portfolio. But in a creative organisation such as the V&A, this cannot be driven for its own sake: the purpose of a coordinated back-of- house platform is solely to best unlock diversity and exploration in terms of front-of-house user experience.
User experience platform
For the V&A to truly build digital capacity, there must be a ubiquitous reach of digital across the institution, its people and its assets. Using a contemporary platform strategy shows how the V&A can be understood as a series of discrete elements and experiences that can be more effectively brought together to share learning, practices, touchpoints and materials, without losing their individual identities, capabilities and missions.
The platform concept is potentially rich enough to unify physical assets and digital media, staff and organisations, practices and processes, guidelines and brands, collections and archives, metadata standards and licensing arrangements, and so on.
User Experience Concepts
Based on user research, the Arup and V&A core teams generated 14 user experience concepts. These concepts can inform the development of new experiences in existing buildings, as well as shape the emerging new buildings. They often deliberately blur physical and digital components. Some have specific spatial implications to V&A sites, whilst others are purely digital in essence. Given that almost every concept has at least some digital component, and clear organisational implications, both should be used to help develop the platform strategy. This should be done in an agile fashion, via design research-led prototyping, directly informing the major building programmes in the east. In this way, we co-develop, for instance, Search the Collections and the Collection and Research Centre simultaneously. This prototype-led approach would ensure that the concepts deployed are creative and cost-effective, generative and coherent, whilst helping deliver the organisation's platform strategy.
