Problem
Museum information is often scattered, outdated, or difficult to navigate, making ticket booking and visit planning more frustrating than expected.
CASE STUDY / 03
MONO
A museum app designed to make discovering exhibitions and booking visits faster, easier, and more intuitive.
A concept mobile experience for people who enjoy museums but not planning them — one clear flow from discovering an exhibition to holding a ticket.
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01 / THE CHALLENGE
Wanting to go isn’t the problem. Planning the visit is.
For many users, visiting a museum is appealing in theory but inconvenient in practice. Finding exhibitions, checking hours, and booking tickets often feels more difficult than it should.
Goal
Design a simple mobile experience that helps users discover exhibitions, explore events, and book visits quickly.
Solution
A clearer museum app that reduces friction across discovery, planning, and booking.
02 / THE USER
Sophia Thomson
Interior designer
San Diego, CA
San Diego, CA
“I enjoy going to museums, but I don’t have time to call, search multiple pages, or figure out how to book.”
Goals
- Buy tickets quickly
- Browse current exhibitions
- Check opening hours easily
- Stay updated on events and new exhibits
Frustrations
- Ticket booking feels confusing
- Important visit information is hard to find
- Event discovery is inconsistent
- Planning a visit takes more effort than expected
About
- Busy professional
- Interested in cultural activities
- Visits museums socially
- Values convenience and clarity
Design persona: a composite I wrote to keep decisions consistent across screens. The interviews shaped the priorities; this profile is a working tool, not a research finding.
03 / RESEARCH INSIGHTS
The biggest issue was not interest — it was friction.
Five short three-question interviews with occasional museum-goers pointed the same way: the problem was less about motivation and more about how much effort planning a visit takes.
Method & limits: five people in my own circle, three questions each. A small, informal sample — enough to surface where the friction sits, not to quantify it.
Booking lacked clarity
Users struggled to find where to start and did not always recognize the right path to reserve tickets.
Exhibitions and events were hard to surface
Important cultural content was often buried, making discovery feel passive instead of inviting.
Visit information needed stronger hierarchy
Opening hours, schedule details, and booking actions needed to be visible earlier in the flow.
Users wanted a faster planning experience
People wanted one place to explore, decide, and book without switching between disconnected pages or channels.
How might we…
- help users discover exhibitions and events more easily?
- make ticket booking feel more direct and intuitive?
- surface visit information at the right moment in the flow?
04 / INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Organizing the experience around discovery and action.
The app structure supports a simple visitor journey: explore, decide, book, and access tickets.
Home
Exhibitions
- Current shows
- Details
- Availability
Events
- Upcoming programming
- Schedule
Booking
- Date selection
- Tickets
- Checkout
Tickets
- Active tickets
- Confirmation
- Visit access
Help
- Support
- FAQs
- Contact
05 / CORE FLOW
From exhibition discovery to confirmed visit.
Primary flow
Home→
Exhibitions→
Exhibition details→
Book tickets→
Select date→
Checkout→
Active ticket
This became the central experience of the product: helping users move from interest to confirmed booking with fewer steps and clearer decisions.
06 / WIREFRAMES & ITERATION
Clarifying navigation and reducing decision friction.
The wireframes were where I argued with myself about navigation labels and how early the booking action should appear. Only what survived that got a visual pass.
What changed
- Simplified navigation labels to make sections easier to understand
- Gave booking actions more prominence across the experience
- Separated exhibitions and events more clearly
- Improved homepage hierarchy so users could access key sections faster
- Reduced unnecessary steps in the reservation flow
Why
The main goal of iteration was to make discovery feel easier and booking feel more direct — especially for users with limited time.
Before — low-fidelity
→
After — high-fidelity
07 / FINAL SOLUTION
A museum experience built around access, not effort.
The final concept brings together exhibitions, events, booking, and ticket access into one mobile flow designed to feel modern, clear, and easy to use.
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Discover with clarity
Users browse exhibitions and events through stronger content hierarchy and cleaner category separation.
Book with less friction
Ticket purchase is surfaced earlier and supported by a more intuitive path from content to checkout.
Plan in one place
Hours, details, availability, and tickets are centralized to reduce effort and uncertainty.
Support repeat visits
After the first booking, the next visit starts from what the visitor already has: their tickets, the hours and what’s coming next.
08 / KEY DECISIONS & TRADE-OFFS
Four choices about where booking lives.
Each one spends screen space or a tap to remove a moment of doubt.
Booking lives where content lives
Every exhibition and event detail carries a direct path to tickets — users never hunt for a separate booking section.
Trade-off — repeated actions spend screen space on content pages.
Exhibitions and events stay separate
Two distinct sections instead of one mixed feed, so each can be scanned with its own logic.
Trade-off — one more top-level destination to learn and maintain.
Practical info before checkout
Dates, times and pricing appear on the detail screen — before anyone commits to paying.
Trade-off — longer detail pages that demand stronger hierarchy.
The ticket takes over after purchase
Once a visit is booked, the active ticket surfaces first — the app’s job shifts from selling to serving.
Trade-off — discovery content gives up the prime slot on visit days.
09 / REFLECTION
What the booking flow taught me.
Most of what I learned here was about sequence — which piece of information has to arrive before someone will commit.
Interest is not enough
Even motivated users abandon experiences when planning feels inconvenient.
Hierarchy shapes confidence
Surfacing the right information at the right time made the app feel more intuitive and trustworthy.
Content and UX are inseparable
For cultural products, discovery depends as much on structure and clarity as it does on visuals.
Simpler flows create stronger engagement
Reducing steps and clarifying actions made the overall experience feel more useful and more inviting.
If this shipped, I’d measure
- booking completion rate, from exhibition detail to confirmed ticket
- time from opening the app to a ticket in hand
- repeat visits and event bookings per user
10 / CONTACT