Tourient screenshot

Tourient

Visit

Designing, developing, and iterating a self guided tours app for museums.

Project Role

UI/UX & Development

Timeline

Ongoing

Team

1 Designer, 2 Developers, 1 Project Manager

Table of Contents

    Background

    Museum software is well known in the industry for being both expensive and providing a poor user experience. Tourient bridges the gap between organizational expectations and vendor reality, offering an industry-first unlimited self guided tours platform at a price organizations can afford.

    Research + Competitive Analysis

    We looked at existing market options including Stqry, CultureConnect, Cuseum, and Nubart Audio Guide, noting what worked and what could be better.

    Across the board, there was a lack of transparent pricing, arbitrary limits on usage and features, and consistently clunky editing experiences. The end-user-facing apps were universally slow to load, lacked accessibility options, and felt dull, with features tour takers would never use, like creating a profile or favoriting a stop.

    We found our focal points in clearing the clutter found in the competition.

    Focal Points

    Working with museum partners to fund the initial development, we prioritized features they actually wanted but couldn't find elsewhere. Namely, the following.

    • Unlimited tours and stops for less than $5,000 annually

    • Basic content like text, audio, images

    • So-called "advanced content" like before/after images, hotspot images, user polls and quizzes, games, etc. Anything the competition would upsell you on.

    • Analytics included.

    • Dead simple content management. Nothing clunky or confusing.

    • An app that loads quick, is accessible, that people actually want to use.

    • QR code generation built-in, along with a way to create social media posts, wall placards, and flyers to promote tours.

    Design + Development

    Design, development, and testing were (and are) an iterative process, incorporating real-user testing with the sort of humans we'd expect to use this on the content editing side and the tour-taking side. We then roll that feedback into improving the app.

    An example of this is comparing our first stab at QR code and marketing asset generation, with our rebuild of the feature.

    Screenshot of an early marketing generation interface
    The initial version used the Urlbox API to retrieve screenshots of hidden QR codes on each tour stop page, then inject those into download links. It worked, but we knew it could be better.
    The rebuilt version retrieves the stop information from the selected tour, and generates QR codes on-the-fly with HTML Canvas, then exports bundled SVG or PNG files for download. It requires fewer clicks, provides more flexibility, and reduces operational overhead.

    Custom Branding

    Screenshot of branded Tourient app.
    Tours can be themed to match exhibits or organizational branding.
    Screenshot of Tourient CMS
    Theme colors are easily edited in the tour's settings.
    Accessibility settings for text size, contrast, and dark / light mode set Tourient apart in the industry for going beyond the bare minimum.
    Tourient loads between 4x to 10x quicker than the competition using a balance of caching and preloading techniques.

    Results

    Our initial client saw a 10x increase in active monthly users compared to their previous tour platform.

    Prev: Home
    Next: McLean County Museum of History