Virtual Museum Webapp - university final year project,

Ideation and Project Proposal

During the ideation stage, we considered; the form the final product should take - a dedicated application or webapp, the target audience, the amount of information to be displayed and the visual theme of the project.

Additionally, we were presented with a design requirement that the project be developed such that the Frome Valley team could create new routes in the future.

Thus the initial stages consisted of gathering information from the client themselves and refining their idea into a consolidated design brief outlining the must haves and should haves for the webapp.

Ideation and Project Proposal

Ideation required extensive research into the current, past and potential future landscape of museums and their relationship with digital tools. During this research I pinpointed specific points of interest and documented my research and analysis.

As this was my final year project, I wanted to build upon aspects that I had enjoyed during my time at university - user experience, the concept of interactivity and interaction flow, and front-end web development.

Due to this, I decided to push my boundaries and explore contemporary web development tools. I briefly researched into three of the most well known tools (Vue, Angular and React) before ideating on initial plans to implement 3D models into my design. Thus I had a direction and knowledge of the tools required to meet my goals.

Literature Review

Following feedback from my academic tutor for the project, I deepened my already extensive research by augmenting it with a period of User Research as follows:

1. Academic research
2. SWOT analysis of competitors
3. Develop interview questions
4. Interview potential users
5. Data Matrix + Thematic Analysis

Using my interview data, I constructed a data matrix and via thematic analysis, extracted a series of major and minor themes. These would form the basis of my must have and should have features and concepts for the remainder of the project.

Demo

Part way through the design and development process, I was required to submit a demo of my project, showcasing one of the major functional components. For this, I created a video showing off how I had used React, Three JS and React Three Fiber to position a series of interactable 3D models in an "exhibit" scene.