How to Make a Museum App

Those who want to turn the situation in their favor & take a step towards digitalization often start with developing their own museum app or website.

And it works quite well. By developing an app or website, museums сan:

1. Improve brand recognition on the Internet and attract younger visitors that value digital technologies.
2. Improve visitors’ engagement — for example, encourage them to spend more time and actively share their experience on social media.
3. Disrupt the stereotype about museums being backward-looking & technologically unadvanced.

In this guide on museum app development we’ll help you define the best strategy for your digital expansion — whether it’s about a website or a mobile application.

The article is also relevant to other similar public places: from galleries and exhibitions to zoos or botanic gardens.

Hold the line — we’ll walk you through the most important parts of this process!

📲 How an App or Website Can Provide Better Visitor Experience

The offline workflow of many regular museums is quite far from being called “digital”.

However, there’s a lot of experience they can use for successful museum app development as well as the hidden potential to unravel.

Digital technologies help to address many concerns and issues that modern museums, galleries and exhibitions can have.

Target each audience even more accurately 🎯

If you'd like to address the Y/Z generations (10-40 years old), you should use gamification, personalization features & make the visits interactive.

Yet, even if you aren’t going to target this audience, they’re likely to be the ones who’ll use your app the most. Why? Because these 2 generations typically are the most active mobile users.

So, it might be a good idea to make your app gen Y/Z-friendly since they’ll use it anyway.

It’s not only about the app but the museum itself as well. Think about placing some “selfie-spots”, interactive exhibits, QR-codes with extra information & other similar details to make your museum more attractive to these generations.

Additionally, social media reinforced by your platform can provide you & your visitors with a powerful community.

Those who regularly visit museums are likely to be like-minded.

Thus, by creating a forum on your platform or Facebook group chat, for example, you offer visitors to share their thoughts with people of similar interests as well as allow this communication outside the museum.

✅ Top Features to Add to Create a Museum Website

In certain cases, a museum website can be sufficient to cover the digital business needs. For example, if your goals are:

• Build online presence to improve brand recognition — have a website that people can browse.
• Sell tickets online so visitors could print them out in advance or show them from the phone.
• Place information about your museum — exhibits, rooms, tours, prices & others.
• Post news about events, temporary exhibitions, etc.
• Offer souvenirs, merch, and other museum-related stuff online.

Options would often include tours for adults, children, families, schools, visitors with special needs, babies, etc.

It’s also popular to offer visitors 3D virtual tours around the museum.

Such tours can come in handy in several ways:

• To plan visits in advance by briefly researching what each hall of the museum has.
• For people from all around the world to e-visit the museum, not depending on the location.
• To cover needs of those who due to personal reasons aren’t able or don’t want to visit the museum physically, thereby expanding the clientele.

Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced the museum industry & many of them started offering virtual tours to stay afloat.

3: Study & Research 📚

Many museums cooperate with universities & scientific centers to conduct research or do it on their own.

A website is a perfect place to post them.

4: “About Us” 📁

An “About us” page is a place where you can deploy information about the museum & the building itself.

Normally, museums place:

• Museum’s historical background.
• Important individuals who had a hand in the museum’s establishment.
• Links to articles about the museum.
• Links to Social Media Pages.

5: Payment Gateway

In case you want to sell tickets & museum-related goodies, you’ll need a Payment Gateway.

To implement it, you could use Braintree, Stripe, or other APIs.

⚙️ Top Features to Add to Create a Museum App

In this section, we’ll review the main features of a web & mobile museum app.

But before that, a quick reminder: if you want to have something simple in terms of interaction, a PWA can be sufficient.

In these cases, a native app might be a better option to suit your business needs:

• You need a highly interactive solution that users will use while visiting your museum.
• You have many features like audio guides, QR-code scanners, gamification, etc.
• PWAs don’t allow using certain features like сamera, mic, and push-notifications for iOS. So, if you don’t want to limit yourself in terms of functionality, you could opt for a native app.
• You want to engage with visitors through an app after the visit itself.
• You want to allow visitors to save or download certain information before the visit so they can access it without the Internet connection.

So now let’s take a look what features you might need for your museum app.

1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

For many apps, it’s not the most needed feature and we recommend making it as simple as possible.

As for museums, you can even skip this stage and allow your visitors to use the app without signing up.

An ideal support service should:

• Provide an AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot that’s programmed to deal with simple troubles & connect users with live real specialists.
• Live chat.
• Several wide-ranged FAQs.
• A list of contacts with several phone numbers for different operators, an email address, Social Media & messengers like Viber, WhatsApp, etc., linked.

✈️ Tech Stack for a Museum App

Since museums were out of the game in terms of digitalization for quite a long time, now communities pay much attention to make sure that museums don’t miss out on the most progressive technologies.

Nowadays, the most used ones are AR (Augmented Reality) & VR (Virtual Reality).

Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented reality is an interactive technology that allows representing different objects digitally to complement the reality.

As practice has shown, such technologies make the visit much more engaging & allow visitors to better percept the information.

Many museums use it to interact with exhibits. Some make their paintings move, others offer visitors to try on ancient costumes or change them on the statue.

The easiest way to use it is to add text near an exhibit when the camera is on it. Simple, but makes a great impression!

This video shows how Chinese museums implement AR technology:

It’s also popular to use for a part of the visit.

Let’s say, the museum is dedicated to ancient England. So, to show a battlefield, museums use VR technology.

📜 Case Study: Track Holodomor History

We at Stormotion recently created an app for the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv.

In this article, we showed you many cases of how an app for in-the-museum use can look like.But this is a great example of how a museum app can provide a unique out-of-the-museum experience.

The idea of this project was to create an app that will guide its users through Kyiv of the 1930s and show the unknown history of Holodomor — tragic events of that time.

Despite the fact that the app was developed for the museum, it’s not supposed to be used inside. The application features historic locations all over Kyiv with archival data — photos, videos, documents. Users can access them either through the list or on the integrated Google Maps.

The application also has gamification elements. For example, some content appears only within 400 meters from the location which makes users more engaged, and encourages to explore Kyiv.

If you’d like to get more detailed information on this case, you can follow the link to the case study on our website.

💡 Takeaways

As you can see, museums can use the app in many ways — from increasing reach & retention to reaching the audience that’s hundreds of kilometers away to gathering a digital community by creating a membership to complement the app.

So, let’s briefly summarize what steps you should take to digitize your museum by developing an app for it:

• Before starting the development, define your target audience & take your facility aspects into account.
• Reason out whether or not you’re going to use gamification features.
• Decide on what features you want to see in your app.
• Deepen your knowledge about AR & VR technologies to decide whether you’ll use them.
• Find a Tech Partner and start the development.

If you need any help with the development or have any questions left, don’t hesitate & drop us a line. We’ll find a way to help you!