The Curious Case of Visitor Journey at the Royal Ontario Museum
How did this all start?
While at Hatch back in Nov 2019, I was assigned to the digital strategy team that led a project for the Royal Ontario Museum. Hatch is a Project consulting organization and as part of their consulting practice they also do external consulting for their clients.
The goal of the Digital Strategy team at Hatch was to help the Royal Ontario Museum become the museum of the 21st century.
The total engagement was for 12 weeks and the ROM had developed a Digital strategy where they had defined 3 goals.
Digital readiness
Empower access, experience & engagement
Evaluate & iterate
Little bit about the Royal Ontario Museum!
The Royal Ontario Museum is a museum of art, world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the largest museums in North America and the largest in Canada.
It attracts more than one million visitors every year, making the ROM the most-visited museum in Canada.
Museum subway station is named after the ROM and, since a 2008 renovation, is decorated to resemble the institution's collection.
Primary Goal of the product!
Growth of the Museum’s national and international audiences.
Increase online sales through general visits and memberships that helps ROM drive more revenue and growth
My Role
Discovery Workshops
UX Research
Internal Stakeholder Interviews
Journey Mapping
Competitive Analysis
Wireframes
User Flows
Information Architecture
Prototypes
Internal Usability Testing
Design Process
Every design project has its own challenges and you have to tailor your process accordingly to the design challenge. For the ROM i decided to go with the following process
Let The Discovery Begin!
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” — Charles Kettering
I Started by doing a kick off workshop with internal stakeholders to get a better understanding of what challenges the Museum was facing and what were some of the areas of opportunity for me to start exploring for each goal!
6 workshops for 3 goals
Current State Analysis
Once I was able to understand the context of the problem, I started evaluating what was the current state of ROM’s problem!
Most important insight!
As I started conducting more research and started exploring how museums across the globe were solving their Digital Transformation challenges, it became more and more apparent that the Museum journey does not start when the visitor reaches the Museum but…
“The Museum Experience begins before the visit to the museum, includes experiences within the museum (interactions with staff and members of one's own group, as well as with other visitors, exhibitions, interpretive materials, and programs), and continues long after the person leaves the museum.”
Visitors do not experience Museums in a single channel
Other Insights
Concept of Omni Channel
Visitors don’t think in channels
Visitors expect a single, unified experience across all of their interactions.
Visitors don’t even distinguish physical and digital experiences, to them it is all one experience, and they expect that to flow seamlessly from one to the other.
They buy their tickets in one channel and pick up in another
This approach is known as omni-channel thinking which was critical to understanding the journey of visitors to the ROM as multiple channels were being invoked while a visitor was trying to visit the museum and their were multiple frictions across those touch points!
Time to deep dive!
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This led to two more internal workshops!
ROM Website Team
Understood the Current State of the ROM website after Prioritization sessions
Identified pain points and most important problems that need to be solved.
Identify the most important target user for this problem space.
ROM Ticketing team
Understood the Current State of the ROM ticketing team after meeting the web team
Identified pain points and most important problems that need to be solved.
Identify the most important target user for this problem space.
Supposing is good, but finding out is better - Mark twain
As I started to dig deep into the quantitative data, the following insights emerged.
47.9% of the visitors were looking to plan their visit and also get information on upcoming events.
62.4% of visitors are looking for general information like planning your visit, buying a ticket, location and directions.
But who are our visitors?
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53% of visitors are females
27% of visitors are between the ages of 25-34 and 22% between the ages of 35-44
49% of visitors are millenials and mostly families
Millennials are our target demographic based on the data we have received from the ROM
Ok but where are they coming from?
68% visitors are from Toronto
Overall the GTA accounts for 61% of the visitors while a healthy 35% are tourists
68% of people are travelling outside of the city of Toronto. How can we help them easily reach the ROM and have an engaging and fun experience.
48% are travelling through TTC & 25% through cars
How do we help people in planning their visit so they have fun and engaging experience at the Museum?
How do we take away the surprise and provide them with a simplified planning experience?
54% visitors are Active families & Active Experience seekers
The focus of the design is to cater to families and how can we help them digitally have a great and fun experience at the ROM.
Who are the Millenials?
In terms of size, the Millennial generation is almost as large as that of their Baby Boomer parents.
Millennials are connected
Millennials are marketing-savvy
Millennials are revolutionaries
Although millennials are mobile-first, a multi-device strategy is needed for full engagement.
The Problem!
Planning the visit to the ROM seems to be very important as from the user feedback from ROM’s data i found that people are travelling from far distances to come to the ROM
They would like to have a better understanding of what they can expect while they are at the ROM.
Also, people would like to visit for short times and want to see what they can do in the time they have.
This includes the ability to plan their visit, buy tickets, find directions etc.)
What I recommended?
Based on my research I was able to recommend that in order to help the visitors have an engaging and frictionless experience at the Museum we need to first focus on the Pre-Visit Journey
User Stories
Task Flows
User Flow
Concept Sketching
The Solution
Responsive landing page focusing on what's happening at the museum, museum hours and location and call to action for plan your visit
Easy and intuitive plan your visit step by step journey enabling the customers with choice and freedom to choose when to come, who they are coming with and what activities would they like to visit while they are at the museum and what else could be interesting.
Simplified navigation to focus on the most important areas customers care about
Simplified customer checkout journey for members and non members by integrating apple and google pay
What did I learn?
One of my biggest insight was learning about Omni channel experiences
Looking at the whole experience holistically vs just at a particular moment in their journey
Define and develop my UX process
Built confidence around conducting workshops with different stakeholders ranging from senior leadership to employees
Refined and learned on my Research skills as i had a lot of data at my disposal which helped me understand the root cause of the problem