Creating a Digital Experience for Indiana University's Art Museum
Discover how the Sydney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University built an immersive, responsive, and custom digital experience for visitors.
Client Overview
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art is a modern teaching museum located on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. With treasures spanning from sub-Saharan Africa to paintings by Monet and Picasso, the museum serves as an important educational tool for professors, students, and tourists. Since its founding in 1941, the Museum of Art has expanded significantly and its collection today now represents nearly every art-making culture in the world.
Delivering a Personalized, Immersive Experience for Museum visitors
The Challenge
Creating ‘Pathways’ for a Custom, Digital Experience
With seven galleries and rotating special exhibitions, the Museum has plenty to offer.
Organizing the collections, however, has been a persistent challenge. Although the Museum is generally organized by geography—such as Ancient Art, Asian Art, Contemporary Art, and so on—the museum staff envisioned a world in which visitors could interact with different subsets of art unrelated to the geographical situation.
They imagined a new digital concept called a “pathway,” where visitors could select a specific pathway with hand-selected items that strung art together through a different lens or organizing factor of their choosing. They needed the right digital product agency to bring this vision to life. They reached out to LaunchPad Lab with the idea of building an app that visitors could easily access when attending the museum—and providing all users with a new, engaging way of interacting with the art exhibits.
The Approach
Determining How to Deliver an Immersive, Digital Experience
To effectively share this new capability of creating a custom “pathway” at the Museum with visitors, the LaunchPad Lab team recommended a Progressive Web App (PWA) that would be user-friendly, customizable, and responsive. Instead of a native app, which would require a download and might be a deterrent to some visitors, a PWA was a streamlined option that enables visitors to access the site via QR code or simply by typing in the URL.
For a client with an immense amount of content—from audio clips and videos to troves of photographs—Contentful provided the absolute best solution. The technology allowed the Museum all the tools necessary to create, update, and disseminate content with ease.
Plus, Contentful was a fantastic option for the Museum’s own technology team. It provided them with the capabilities of editing and distributing content with ease and efficiency. Pairing Contentful with Gatsby would make building the website streamlined and efficient.
The Solution
Building an Engaging and Accessible Digital Experience
The new user-friendly application offers visitors the ability to design a digitally enhanced and personalized experience when visiting the museum, including:
Custom Pathways: Users can create personalized pathways based on their visit. For example, students working on a clothing project can now filter the Museum collection to find a pathway about clothing that spans all cultures, geographies, and timelines.
Accessible Design: The app offers use on mobile and desktop devices. What’s more, visitors can access the app via QR codes or URLs, removing the need for app downloads and ensuring inclusivity for all audience demographics.
Content Management: Museum staff can now update and manage content for exhibits and art on display easily.
The Results
Delivering a Customizable, Intuitive, Digital Experience for Museum visitors
After implementing the new app and encouraging visitors to create their own pathways throughout the Museum’s collection, they received an overwhelmingly positive response. With an all-encompassing opportunity to interact with art, the Museum is primed to reach more people and engage with visitors every step of the way. The results have led to streamlined access for users to plan visits and efficiency gains with museum staff able to easily update information for upcoming exhibits and visits.
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