How to Make a Museum App

In the age of digitalization, many people learn about brands & places from the Internet. If we take a look at museums, the ones that don’t have digital presence, are usually behind their competitors.

What you can also do is take a look at who your target audience are in terms of their background — tourists, locals, cultural & historical specialists, etc.

Depending on that, you might need to highlight different information on your platform. For instance, tourists might want something more entertaining yet informative, while historians might be interested in deep details & facts.

A little side note: be sure not to drag visitors’ attention from the actual museum. An app should rather encourage them to interact with the exhibits more as well as deepen the understanding of their background & meaning.

With a mobile app or website you can also easily introduce new languages for your guests. Depending on the location, popularity and nationality of your visitors.

Per se, Germany is known for a large number of Turkish immigrants & citizens with a Turkish background. Thus, you can find guides in Turkish in many museums.

With an application, it’s easier than ever to create or edit guides or descriptions of exhibits — no need to re-print all the materials or duplicate information offline.

Interactivity & Engagement 🎮

It often can happen that visitors’ aren’t that interested in reading long paper guides & information about exhibits. Consequently, there’s not enough engagement for them to stay focused during the whole visit.

One of the best ways of increasing visitors’ engagement using the museum app is by making it interactive. And one of the most used interactive tools, in turn, is gamification.

Actually, many museums already use gamification elements: trying on ancient costumes, taking pictures with your head sticking out of copies of paintings, role-playing, and others. However, the use cases aren’t digital for the most part.

But with an app, your gamification possibilities significantly extend. For example, it may be implemented in following ways:

• Platform currency or points that visitors earn through a variety of activities & achievements. They can include reading information about an exhibit, discovering new rooms, posting to social media, etc.
• “Easter eggs” all the way around the museum. For example, when visitors read information about an exhibit to the very end, a hidden note with a fascinating fact about it or with additional points can pop up.
• Quizzes & tests after reading or listening to a new piece of information. However, visitors who don’t want to take them should be able to simply skip them.

Eventually, gamification can help you not only in terms of engagement. You can use these features to encourage visitors to make purchases at your souvenir stores, cafes, etc.

For example, you can offer users an X% discount, depending on how many points they’ve collected.

Many museums and galleries have already understood the advantage of such an approach. For example, Bristol Museums

It’s an application that provides visitors with personalized routes, giving them rewards & points for taking photos, visiting special locations, and just exploring “the hidden”.

Another consequence of visitors lacking interactivity & engagement is that visits can be somewhat chaotic. It can result in the wrong perception of what they've seen.

Luckily, there’s a digital solution for this problem as well.

Many modern museums are actively using iBeacons — devices that catch visitors’ location and trigger special events. Thus, when users pass by, it will play a specific part of audioguide, open a specific page in the app, etc.

And that’s exactly how the German Bundestag organized audio guided tours to the Reichstag’s dome.

When visitors walk along this spiral passage with the audioguide, it automatically starts telling the next piece of information at certain locations because of such beacons.

Social Media 📱

Nowadays, Social Media is such a strong tool for improving reach & engagement. So, to stay ahead of the competition (since many museums neglect this opportunity), consider providing engagement with social media via your platform.

Besides, you can offer your visitors to share their experiences at your museum on social media right from your app or website.

Maybe, offer them free coffee in the cafeteria — just something encouraging so they’ll have a reason (except for having a good time) to do this simple but such a useful action.

And the best part about it is that users can make the museum “visible” by themselves when sharing their experience.

In fact, social media is one of the best marketing tools that’s totally affordable, compared to offline marketing.

But online ads have to lead users somewhere, which is where an app or website can help — these are great options to place a link to.

In case you want to provide something slightly more interactive, think about developing PWA (Progressive Web App) — a web application that is close to a mobile app in terms of functionality.

So, a website for a museum can consist of the following sections:

1: “Plan Your Visit” 📄

The structure of this section can look like this:

• The first feature to be in this section is normally ticketing so users can buy tickets in advance.
• Some museums like to give potential visitors some tips on where to go in the museum.
• Along with recommendations, you will often find a museum plan & calendar with events.
• If a museum has some additional facilities like souvenir shops or cafeterias, you’ll find a list of items or menus there, too.

2: Tours 🗺️

This is a place on a website to put all information about available tour options.

However, it’s always good to know a little about your customers so you could reach out to them later & inform them about upcoming events.

For this purpose, you can ask for:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Phone number.

But still, make it optional — an obligatory sign-up can be repellent.

Sometimes,an app can be accessible without signing up, but extended features like gamification (collect points & get a discount for that, in many cases) require it.

It’s also popular among museum-like places (galleries, exhibitions, etc.) to place a QR-code that leads directly to their application either on App Store/Google Play or on a web page.

Nowadays, it has become trendy among museums to offer a membership. So in case you offer such subscriptions, it might be a good idea to offer exclusive content & other benefits right in their app profiles.

So, if you want to digitize them as well like British Museum, American Alliance of Museums, and others, you can offer:

• Free digital magazine throughout the duration of the membership.
• Access to the exclusive/limited content on the platform.
• QR-codes and digital cards that are discounts for visiting museum cafes or at souvenir stores.
• Emailing or regular content updates with relevant recent news & others.

In fact, we have an article dedicated to creating a membership website of your own in case you’d like to learn more about it:

2: Home Screen 📊

Home Screen is a kind of lounge before starting the actual journey.

Normally, users should have quick access to the main features from here. You can also place sections “About us” where you tell a story of the museum itself, links to social media, etc.

This is also where users would access the ticketing.

3: Informational Guides 🧭

An app can partially or even fully replace your paper booklets with the information about the museum & exhibits.

Apart from convenience, you won’t have to spend money on printing them. You can also be more eco-friendly by reducing paper use.

Besides, you can easily correct mistakes and typing errors in the code of an app, without having to reprint the booklets & guides.

And generally, managing them (adding new languages, descriptions of new exhibits, complementing the old info, etc.) takes much less time & can be done at no cost.

What’s especially great about museum apps is that you can create and implement any type of guides in it:

• Textual descriptions of exhibits & halls.
• Audio guides of any type — for instance, for a museum visit in general or for certain exhibits/rooms separately.
• Video content.

4: Exhibit Screen 🗿

This feature is usually organized as a separate screen, fully dedicated to a certain exhibit. Here you may place a general description, some interesting facts, pictures or videos, etc.

It can be done in different ways:

• You can make a list with all available exhibits & a search bar.
• Many museums go further and place a QR-code near each exhibit.
• Or you can mix both approaches – whatever fits your case the best!

5: Ticketing 🎟️

To make the user experience & visit as convenient as possible, you can offer your potential visitors to purchase tickets in advance via an app.

First of all, it can save both your & visitors’ time.

Second of all, it allows visitors to book tickets for special events on time so they wouldn’t miss them.

To pay for them, users would need a secure & reliable Payment Gateway.

It should:

• Be consistent with different OS.
• Allow using all popular payment options like a credit card, PayPal, Apple & Google Pay, etc.
• Function fast without delays.
• Protect users’ personal data strongly.

You could also offer to book a ticket and pay in cash later. However, it’s possible that some people will book it and then simply don’t come.

6: Virtual Tours 🥽

It’s kind of an extended feature but still totally doable.

So, many museums (and not only they) offer their visitors 3D virtual tours around the museum.

Basically, it’s a digital version of the museum that users can access anytime for free.

If you’d like to charge users for these tours, it’s a great idea to offer virtual visits to some parts of the museum at no cost, but take charges for full access.

7: Calendar 📅

To better manage special exhibitions, openings, celebrations, and other events that museums organize & inform users about them as quickly as possible, museums often add in-built calendars.

Quite obviously, you can place event details on a relative day in the calendar. It’s also great to place a “Buy a ticket” button next to each event.

Besides, you can offer users to turn on notifications to send reminders of these events & use them for marketing purposes.

8: Support Service 🤖

So that the impression of a visit or user experience won’t worsen because of some easy-to-solve problem, we’d recommend you provide a support service.

Sometimes, museums use AR to provide tours with virtual guides. For example, some museums use the guideBOT from ViewAR to provide such tours.

Virtual Reality (VR)

Virtual reality is a technology that simulates the real or imaginary world or situation.

The difference between AR and VR is actually quite substantial.

AR is a kind of complement to the real world while VR immerses you to the whole new world without interacting with reality.

Museums use it to provide virtual 360-degree tours, organize remote exhibitions, and bring historical scenes to life.

For example, this is a fully digital tour around the Royal Tyrrell Museum: