Revealing a world unknown until now.

Many like art and history, but do they know how they’re conserved and restored? With this project not only do I invite users to discover the mysteries behind this profession, but I also offer a useful and functional tool for professionals.

In 2 weeks I created a useful tool for Art doctors to use. Art doctors? Exactly, I’m talking about Conservators-restorers of Cultural Property. But why would a UX/UI designer be interested in such a thing? Well, before I began my journey as a designer, I took a trip to the past and fell in love with everything there was to learn to better our present and future. I dedicated myself to conserve and restore archeology so that the future generations could also fall in love and learn the stories they behold. And, even though my journey as a restorer finished prematurely, my new role as a designer can bring users closer to this world and also give professionals a tool that can help them with their job. But are people interested in learning about it? With the help of Design thinking, I could investigate and develop my prototype.

Investigating:

With the doubt (and wish) if people were interested in knowing more about conservation and restoration, I went to the “Museo Arqueológico Nacional” of Madrid (also known as “MAN”) to find out by doing small interviews to the visitors. And, even though not all of them knew what conservation and restoration was, and those who knew did so because of the bad practices mentioned on the news, all of them wanted to learn more about it and how the paintings and objects exposed in museums were intervened.

Afterwards, with the help of benchmarking, I began to compare the leading museum apps on the market, comparing them aesthetically, in content, functionalities, and accessibility to all OS platforms, automatically disqualifying those who were only available in IOS, like the Louvre, MoMa or the Tate museums.

And, despite their advantages and disadvantages, none of them talked about the restoration or conservation processes. But what about their web pages? Well, after my desk research I concluded that even though museums in Spain have fewer resources, they are less hesitant to share or expose to the public how their objects and paintings have been treated. This isn’t the case in Amsterdam, where they‘ve recorded and exposed to the public the restoration process of Rembrandt’s “The Night watch”. But renowned Spanish museums have done this before, and with several paintings.

Nevertheless, the information they give is too basic and brief. They barely explain what they’ve done in each process, so the average visitor doesn’t understand what they’ve done and the professional won’t get helpful information for their restorations.

Lastly, I interviewed a professional restorer from whom I obtained facts that confirmed my initial suspicions and the data I got from the interviews back at the museum:

1. Users want and are asking museums to give out more information about the restoration of the objects from their collections.
2. For the professional, it’s very difficult to get the information they need or to access professional reports, but the Spanish Institute of Cultural Heritage, also known as the IPCE, has made public every single report of every object they’ve intervened.

After all the investigation process, two things were clear: there is a true demand from the public to learn more about the profession and the professional needs more information and reports to be public.

Deciding:

I had the information I needed, so now it was the time to decide on what my app would have. Thanks to the previous benchmark I made, it was very easy for me to decide what functionalities I wanted, but there were so many that I had to prioritize. To help me with that prioritization, I used a User Journey and a MoSCoW to decide which were necessary and which would be postponed.

And with this prioritization in mind, now I had to organize everything with the help of a Site map. With it, I planned how the information would be organized according to the 2 different profiles the user could have: the professional and the average museum visitor.

And lastly, I did a value proposition canvas focusing on the pain points and frustrations that professionals had and my app could solve.

Prototyping:

Before I began to make my wireframes in high fi, I needed to have a clear idea of the style of my app, its logo, and its name:

1. Logo: For the logo, I illustrated the two tools that could better describe my app: a scalpel, the most basic tool a restorer uses, and a brush, the universally know tool to any artist and its creativity. As for the colors of my brand and of the background of my logo, after testing various combinations, I chose a gradient of blue, that symbolizes the intellectual and analytic side of art, and purple, symbolizing the intuitive and creative aspect of any artist. As for the name, I called it “Restaurarte”, a pun in Spanish in which the first part (written in a more serious typography) and the name refers to the fact that the user is restoring itself, and the termination “-arte” (written with a brush stroke-like typography) symbolizes creativity and art itself.

2. Colors: As for the aesthetic of my app I ran away from the overused monochromy used in the apps I saw during my benchmarking because they were too monotonous and serious. But could I include color without it being too overwhelming or taking away protagonism from the actual art that the app would have? Well, I used white as my primary color not only because it’s a clean and bright color, but because it also signifies the canvas ready to be painted. I also included different shades of gray as my neutral colors and my brand colors again to symbolize some sections my app would have. I would use the blue for the “explore” section of my app, that would contain informative content. I would use the purple on the user’s profile section that the user could personalize freely. As for my dictionary and my informative texts I chose black, and for my semantic colors, I chose red to symbolize favorites and green for completed downloads.

3. Typography: As for the typographies, I used a more aesthetic one for the main titles like the “Quando” and a more simple, modern and legible one of the rest of my content like the “Raleyway”, playing with different weights to organize hierarchically my content.

Finally, I began to plan and organize the layout of the content of my wireframes in low fi with Balsamiq and to prototype in high fi with Figma using an 8px grid as my layout.

And what was the result of all this process?

Click right here to find out: http://bit.ly/2E9X4v3

Y si quieres leerlo en español, haz click aquí: http://bit.ly/2P9PkzB