Digital Minister Office, Government of Taiwan
The eTicketing system is one of my projects in Public Digital Innovation Space led by the Digital Minister of Taiwan. PDIS is an inner consultancy under the Taiwanese government, facilitating the digital transformation of the government agencies.
National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan
National Palace Museum is the biggest Taiwanese museum, collecting plentiful ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks.
Currently, the guided tour reservation service and ticketing service are independent of the museum’s main website.
We were tasked to propose an improvement plan for the interface and information architecture of the current three websites.
Museum’s main website
Online reservation system
Third-party ticketing service
Make the limited guided tour service reach to the visitors who need them the most.
Come up with a feasible plan that doesn’t change the current system too much.
National Palace Museum eTicketing and Reservation System is an integrated platform where individual visitors can order tickets, reserve guided tours or multimedia guides, and review orders efficiently.
Visitors can easily order tickets and reserve guided tours on one website, rather than jumping between multiple sites.
Visitors can now reserve guided tours and audio guides while purchasing tickets online.
Using tags to indicate Ticket Type.
Filtering available dates of guided tour using Toggles.
Revealing audio options using Dynamic Detection.
Checking the orders using just email and order number.
We used Net Promoter Score, or NPS, to measure our participants’ experience and their overall perception of the new eTicketing system. The outcomes suggested that people are more willing to get their tickets online.
Tour groups make up 70% of annual museum visitors and about 50% of tour groups are from mainland China. However, in the past decade that number has been steadily declining. Therefore, the museum decided to pivot to attracting more individual visitors.
About 5.5 million people visit the museum every year
Using the data, we created 5 personas representing the different target visitor groups and recruited participants who fit these personas.
In addition to interviews, we also conducted usability tests with the participants. We asked them to complete a set of tasks using the main website and current reservation system.
Online reservation system
Participants had a hard time locating the exhibits and ticketing pages.
Participants were confused about what was included with each type of ticket.
The calendar feature on the reservation page didn’t actually help participants make the reservation more efficiently.
Participants were not confident about going to an external website to get tickets.
Some participants didn’t notice the online guided tour reservation service.
Participants found it inconvenient to order tickets and reserve tours separately.
For example, young parents believe guided tours can provide their kids with a better learning experience while visiting the museum.
From the conversation with the museum, I realized the spots for the guided tours are very limited since it’s hard to find and train qualified volunteers.
The museum’s guided tour with kids
After listing out the challenges and constraints, I realized we were facing a problem that cannot be solved by improving each website separately. We had to start with the user journey and consider our user’s holistic, pre-visiting experience as well.
I created a chart to visualize the key user flow of the new eTicketing system.
Following the new user flow, we created a mid-fidelity prototype using Sketch and InVision to simulate the experience of the re-designed system.
I created the mid-fidelity prototype in Sketch.
We conducted the second round of usability testing with the same participants. The goal is to understand whether the new flow really helps people complete the tasks within a certain amount of time.
Test result of the mid-fidelity prototype
From the testing, the ease of use was increased dramatically and the time spent on each task reduced as compared to the previous round of testing. Using these findings, we updated the design to the high fidelity prototyped version of the website.
Based on the feedback, we iterated the design and created a high-fidelity prototype with a proposal as the final deliverable for our client.
Steven is an Australian software engineer who is interested in Chinese culture. He plans to travel alone to Taiwan and visit the National Palace Museum in the summer.
Steven can now browse through the current exhibits on the website and know how to get the tickets online for the exhibits he is interested in.
Participants were confused about what was included with each type of ticket.
Participants had a hard time locating the exhibits and ticketing pages.
To make sure visitors knew which tickets were related to specific exhibits, we decided to add a label to indicate the required ticket type on both the exhibition page and the exhibition list in our final prototype.
Steven is enthusiastic about the special Jade exhibition.
Steven would like to buy a special ticket for the Jade exhibition. He now can click the Buy Ticket button to get into the ticketing page.
Some participants don’t notice there is an online guided tour reservation service.
Participants found it inconvenient to order tickets and reserve tours separately.
From the research, we chose the toggle as the best interface for integrating reservation services with the new eTicketing system.
Toggles can help users filter the Visit Date and Admission Time when any guided tour is available and compare them.
Based on the feedback from the second round of testing, we added a call out for users to understand more about the guided tours in the high-fidelity prototype.
When you toggle off, the drop-down list will show the upcoming dates when the museum is open.
When you toggle on, the list will only reveal the dates when guided tours are available.
Steven believes that attending a guided tour will be helpful for him to understand the story behind the jade exhibit.
After checking out, Steven will receive a confirmation email with an order number. To confirm his purchase, he can go back to the museum’s website and review the order.
Participants are not interested in registering an account just for reviewing their purchases.
With privacy concerns, we decided to require an Order Number and Email Address to access orders.
In the second round of testing, we saw our participants attempted to cancel the guided tour but still wanted to keep the ticket they ordered. Therefore, we separated the guided tour reservation from the ticket using a tiled interface.
The eTicket entrance in the museum
With the new integrated website, Steven is able to be well-prepared for his big visit to the museum.
