Jenny Holzer Museum App
Interaction & Visual Design
Duration: Jul 2022, 1 week
Tools: Figma, Photoshop
Brief
A museum app designed for Jenny Holzer that allows art enthusiasts, museum-goers, and fans to connect with her work by creating augmented reality projections inspired by her style.
This app was designed with the Human psychology principles from 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk in mind. Specifically, how people make decisions, what motivates them, and how to make them feel positively, while interacting with an app.
Background
About Holzer
Jenny Holzer is part of the neo-conceptual movement. Her best-known work is her sayings or “Truisms' ' which started as white paper with black italic script placed in and around Manhattan but has extended to other mediums—mainly LED signage and projections, which she is now widely known for.
Photo Credit
Photo of Jenny Holzer, sourced on Wikimedia Commons. No photographer listed. URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jenny_holzer.jpg
App Goals
The main goals of the app are for users to feel connected to Jenny Holzer by creating art like her and motivate them to an upcoming exhibit.
Many apps struggle to engage users, especially when their functionality is limited to a single use case, like a museum exhibit. So, it was important for the app to give users initiative to come back, even without an upcoming exhibit.
Required features for the app
A gallery of selected works of the artist.
A sketch tool that gives users a way to connect to Holzer and her work by creating art like her.
A way to motivate users to go to an upcoming exhibit of the artist’s work.
How might we design an app that connects the user to Holzer and motivates them to go to the retrospective?
Challenges
Up to this point, I normally had about 2 weeks to a month to complete my academic projects. This time, however, I only had a week to design the app and prepare a presentation deck, so, this was a project I really needed to prioritize my time effectively. With that in mind, I laid out a plan that I used throughout the week to keep on track:
Day 1–2: Preliminary Work
Day 3–4: App Design
Day 5–7: Presentation Deck
Day 1-2: Preliminary Work
Until this project, I wasn’t familiar with Jenny Holzer or her work. To gain a deeper understanding of her as an artist and artistic style, I began by researching a few of her pieces. This gave me invaluable context and insight and helped me create a more authentic representation of her work in my design.
Below, I highlighted three pieces that eventually inspired the features and visual design of the final design.
Next, I created a moodboard to establish an overall aesthetic. Since Holzer is widely-known for her neon signage, I centered the mood board around that distinctive style. This approach helped inform my design decisions in the upcoming stages.
4 concepts
Then, I came up with a few possible exhibit ideas that give users the ability to create art like Holzer. They range from a giant “truism wall” to an entirely AR exhibit. The common theme is users writing their own sayings or “truisms.”
Concept Map
Ultimately, I went with the “regular AR” idea because it offered the perfect balance between motivating users to go to the retrospective and allowing them the flexibility to connect to the artist (and use the app) outside of the retrospective.
I hashed out each of the three basic features: information on the retrospective, the gallery of selected work, and the AR.
Site Map
After finalizing the idea, I created the basic map to outline the structure of the app. Because of the time crunch, I had to focus on the most basic features: The landing page, the gallery, and the sketching tool.
Day 3-4: The Design
Mid-Fis
As a highly-detailed individual, I always find myself mulling over every pixel in my designs. But, for this project, I didn’t have time to overthink. As I designed my mid-fis, I kept repeating to myself, “don’t think just go,” to really fight against my typical perfectionist mindset and focus on getting the basic layout and can make edits later.
The Final
Landing Page
The landing page acts as a portal for the rest of the app, giving users shortcuts to make it easier to navigate and encourage them to seek more information.
Selected Work
In the gallery, the user has the option to see, not all but, a few of Holzer’s works in each category.
Create your Own “Truism”
Finally, users are able to create their own truisms and submit them to the upcoming exhibit. This gives them another motivator to go. They can also explore this feature anytime even without an exhibit going on.
Day 5-7: Presentation Deck
With the design completed, I created the actual presentation deck tailored to a project manager and developer. It goes through the preliminary process as discussed as well as a walkthrough of a prototype.
Next Steps
Figure out what the user-created exhibit would look like and hash out the details—like how many pieces are chosen.
App Flow: Show what creating truism would look like if no exhibit was going on.
Conduct user testing and iterating based on the results
Create the working app.
Takeaways
The biggest lesson I took away from this project was time management and prioritization. Normally, I tend to overthink my designs, struggle with choice paralysis, and go down the scope-creep rabbit hole, especially if I have too much time to work on a project.
However, the short time frame for this app forced me to keep on schedule and prioritize what was most important, and I didn’t have time to overthink and go too far beyond the scope of the project. Ironically, I liked this approach a lot better and was happier with the outcome than I was when I had more time. In the end, this became one of my favorite projects.