MUXseology: designing meaningful experiences based on data.
Museology:
the study of museums, their history, design, and management.
UX: the process of designing meaningful and relevant experiences for the end user.
It's not a fluke that I came to UX through museum studies.
Museums are physical manifestations of user experience. They are an immersive, interactive, information-rich experience. Everything from the flow of traffic, to the placement of text on walls and panels, to the lighting, right down to the temperature control within object display cases is rigorously thought out. The museum exhibit is UX design in three dimensions. ​
Exterior facade of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. In 2016 and 2017, I performed a formative visitor study for their "Bloodsuckers" exhibit. In 2017, our team was awarded the ROM Visitor Engagement award fin recognition of our work.
I was introduced to UX while studying museums at the University of Toronto iSchool. While there, I decided to enrol in a Knowledge Media Design course. Soon, I was building prototypes, writing conference papers, and leading independent courses on locative media and AR. I had never considered myself a "tech" person before—but I had always been a "museum" person.
While museums study visitor movements, UX studies user clicks. Museums create representative profiles of their visitor demographics, UX designers create representative personas. Museums carefully arrange objects in display cases, write brief descriptions on labels, and meticulously plan out the flow of traffic through an exhibit. UX builds information architectures, writes informative button text, and tracks user flows to determine pain points and measure KPI. Both focus on the human behind the experience: the visitor, the user.
Since grad school I have performed research for tourism organizations, laid out websites for premiere hotels, designed websites for local entertainment companies, designed and built escape rooms, and tutored countless students. No matter what project I take on, my focus remains on the human behind the experience.