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Museum Guide

Summary

Modular software to help museums manage and create immersive exhibitions.

This includes exhibition management software for museums to manage their own exhibitions and their content. For the visitor it means having a clean, easy to use check-in and check-out experience with the possibility to receive a custom summary of their tour by email.

Our solution

By building an API driven system we can support multiple frontend applications and provide them with consistent data. Thus enabling exhibitors to create content that can be enjoyed by every visitor. A lot of effort went into creating the right UI/UX to enhance the use of the software

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It helps two or more applications to talk to each other and exchange data.

UI/UX will refer to User Interface and User Experience, which describes the look and feel of the software.

Key terms

Target platform

Web Application

Locally or Cloud hosted

Desktop

Any modern browser

Mobile and Tablets

Any modern browser

System Frontend

Java Script

Programming Language

GraphQL Apollo

API Scheme

React

Frontend Library

Jest

Testing

Material UI

Styling Library

System Backend

Kotlin

Programming Language

GraphQL Apollo

API Scheme

Spring Boot, Core

DB Access

JUnit 5

Testing

Mockito

Testing

Build Tools

GitLab

Repository

Git

Version Control

Gradle

Build Tool

Yarn

Package Manager

ESLint

Code Style

Docker

Deployment

Database and UI / UX Design Tool

PostgreSQL

Database

Figma

UI / UX Design

Project goal

Rewrite Storytelling

Our goal was to help the Dojo team create management software for their new product: The Dojo stick.

Picture of a Dojo stick

This innovative IoT device functions as an audio guide that emits sound by bone conduction. However, the product is still under development and it needs software to manage and prepare exhibitons to later upload them to the device itself.

That's where the FHNW student team helped the Dojo team to develop the user interface and experience, as well as parts of the software. The software was to consist of 4 parts:

Dojo API
Exhibitor Management
Exhibition Management
Kiosk Terminal

We ended up building the Dojo API, the Exhibiton Management, and designing the UI/UX of the Kiosk Terminal using Figma. This restriction was due to the Covid-19 situation shutting down IP3.

Dojo API

The Dojo API serves as the single point of truth for all Dojo related data. All other software components are to access this API to display and manipulate data.

Exhibition Management

The Exhibition Management is the software used by museums and exhibitors to create and manage their exhibitions. This allows the museum the ability to set up audio tracks and other bookmarkable content for each unique tour.

Kiosk Terminal

The Kiosk Terminal is the software used by museum visitors. A visitor will check-in using a touch device. Then they will select a tour for which they will be guided by the audio guide.

When leaving the exhibtion they will check-out and receive a summary of all content they bookmarked on the dojo stick during their stay.

Initial situation

We started the project without source material to begin with. Most artefacts were created with the client in separate focus meetings. The UI/UX team and the developer team worked in parallel to gain the most momentum. The dev team started by setting up the repositories, initializing the tech stack and developing the first iteration of the database scheme. The UI/UX team developed the Exhibition Management with the client as Figma prototype, so that the developers were able to start implementing it when IP4 began. While the Exhibition Management was being constructed the UI/UX team sketched the Kiosk Terminal together with the customer.

Benefits of your solution

Because of the dojo stick still being under construction and the startup being founded during the project time the scope and needs for the software were prone to change. Our modular approach and splitting the concerns into different small applications enabled us to react to change rapidly. No matter how the business is going to change, the API will be able to change with it and provide it's functionality to each application connected. By keeping the user interfaces lean and bound to one purpose they can easily be adapted to match any change that is about to happen. Since the UI/UX team worked closely with the customer we are certain that we built the right application and prepared them to showcase their vision to potential exhibitors and museums.

Results

Dojo API

The API was designed to meet all endpoints needed in the Exhibition Managment. This includes endpoints for CRUD operations, find and findAll methods.

Exhibtion Mangement

CRUD operations on exhibitions
CRUD operations on exhibits
Storing and reading files from the Google Cloud service

Create, Read, Update and Delete

Our client asked us to put more time and effort into a clickable Figma prototype for the Exhibition Management to showcase new features and UI/UX elements they came up with in the later stages of IP4.

Kiosk Terminal

In order to showcase the vision and check -in and -out experience, we developed a clickable prototype with our customer to showcase the whole functionality to a potential exhibitor.