Our journey with Museums at Museums22

SHALINI BANSAL

CO FOUNDER HopON India & Museum22

By Desiwalks Tours Pvt.Ltd.

For the longest time in human history, museums were huge buildings you’d visit on the weekends with your family or on field trips from your school. This changed in 1995. This is when the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, now known as the History of Science Museum became the first museum to launch its website. With this came the detailed, high- resolution images of artworks, books, instruments, and various artefacts, in addition to virtual exhibitions.

However, integrating new technological tools with existing systems comes with its own set of challenges. For instance, the visitor experience curation process in museums is very unique and complex, and integrating new technological tools can necessitate a change in mindset along with extensive staff training. Additionally, budget constraints frequently limit the ability of museums to adopt advanced technologies.

Why SaaS?

"THE BEST USE OF DIGITAL IS TO NOT MAKE YOU AWARE OF THE TECHNOLOGY, BUT TO MAKE YOU AWARE OF THE ART."

- Jane Alexander, Chief Information Officer, Cleveland Museum

This quote perfectly embodies the role of any technology in a museum. This was the mantra on which we decided to base our user experience design as we aet off.

However, we soon realised that we needed to go a step further if we were to deliver a successful solution - the best use of digital would be when we also allowed the museum teams to focus not on the technology, but on their art. Therefore, delivering a centralised solution that improves user experience, simplifies operations, cuts down the mundane and continues to update and innovate would work the best.

SaaS seemed to be the answer to most of these questions- instead of parachuting into a system, it was known to effortlessly mesh with existing setups. We felt it would, therefore, ease the typical hurdles of technological adoption in the cultural sector.

We started on our journey with museums with this understanding and established the first SaaS based audio guide mobile application in the country.

SaaS, or Software as a Service, is a cloud-based method where clients subscribe to an application instead of purchasing it for a one-time installation. SaaS, in short, refers to a serviced software that is well managed for the client- museum and reduces its burden significantly. While there are many reasons for a museum to adopt SaaS, the most important one is the assurance of getting a risk-free, tried and tested solution.Additionally,a cloud based solution does not need deployment of servers on museum premises and reduces the hassles of maintaining hardware and cost of staff. The entire software and content is hosted on our (service provider’s) cloud.

What features to build?

While our SaaS based audio guide app technology was adopted in many museums and by users across geographies, we were still trying to understand and develop the other features and services that museums could benefit from.

We increasingly felt the need for museums to embrace a data-driven approach that enhances user experience, as well as, aligns museum operations more closely with their mission and goals. In this way, building a data analytics dashboard in addition to our real time user dashboard became important. We hope that it will soon become a cornerstone of the museum policy-making process.Features like heat maps and ability to generate infographics of app usage over defined periods of time at the click of a few buttons provide the museum team important data at a glance.

As a robust backend CMS and dashboard was getting built, we could not ignore our front end user- the museum visitor. Recently, during our collaboration with the Valmik Museum in Amritsar, we enhanced visitor experiences by leveraging an app to synchronise multilingual audio commentary with videos playing on screens in the galleries of the museum.

Behind the scenes

Our largest investment in the last financial year was our transition to a new software platform, which allows us to serve our users more effectively without any costs for our clients. This kind of a benefit is only possible for a museum that uses Software as a Service (SaaS).We shifted from an older system (Yii2) to a more modern and supportive framework called Laravel. Laravel helps us build and manage our web services better by providing improved tools and resources, which makes it easier for our developers to maintain and enhance our applications.The new system, Laravel, improves our team’s efficiency with its straightforward and powerful tools. It enhances the security of our services, protecting against common online threats. For the app users, the speed and efficiency of our apps is now much higher, thereby leading to a much better experience. Adopting SaaS opens up numerous possibilities for museums. While paying subscription fees, museums do not have to pay additional fees for tech advancements, features, hiring tech staff and other costs that usually come with building and managing technologies.

It also gives access to exclusive features to museums.

In our case, Museum22 is rolling out a series of new interactive and engaging experiences on all our apps that are specifically meant for children. This increases the value of the app for our museums, and in turn, benefits visitors greatly.

We believe the time has come for museums to understand and reap the benefits of SaaS for enhancing visitor experiences and we are here to help them!

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