Burke Museum Accessibility

We began by visiting the museum ourselves and creating a journey map based on our experience, in order to identify pain points for museum visitors. We noted that the museum might not be as accessible for senior citizens, and chose to interview several senior visitors and a handful of staff members to gain more insight.

Based on our interviews, we determined that the main barriers to accessibility were a lack of comfortable seating, low lighting, and small font on signage. We also noted a language barrier for non-native English speakers, and room for improvement in giving patrons access to museum staff in case of emergency. We sought to design a complete solution which would address all of these issues.
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Based on our research insights, we proposed a solution: a tablet interface that could be accessed while seated, with large fonts and audio guides in case of low vision.

We started by defining the main task flow, as well as two subtasks. The main goal was to allow patrons to engage with nearby museum content, and our secondary goals were giving the user the option to change content language and the option to speak with museum staff, in case of emergency.
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One main hurdle we faced was the design of the main screen . We wanted to intrude as little as possible on the actual in-museum experience, and hoped to map the content onscreen as directly as possible to the user's visual surroundings.

We went through many iterations of this page, and ended up relying on photography that showed the surrounding exhibition and artifact locations. This would allow the user to remain immersed in the museum space, creating a multimodal and integrated learning experience.
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