The Met Primer
We use stories to spark emotion, make sense of things, and learn. Stories are uniquely human and help us understand the world. Storytelling increases audience engagement and loyalty and in a space where everything is vying for our attention, it’s a crucial tool in aligning the digital world with the physical museum.
As content consumption behavior continues to evolve, we focus on storytelling that gives audiences a choice and answers the question ‘why should I care?’
Initial approach
Reinvent the digital storytelling experience with this new framework that can support multiple content verticals. The solution blends multiple media formats and immersive interactive design in a unique way. These experiences can be a visitor’s primary source of preparing for their visit.
Goals and audience
We wanted to create content that is approachable to first-time visitors, especially younger ones that don’t usually engage with museum content with a flexible technology that allowed for iteration.
Learn before you go
Prepare prospective audiences for their experience at The Met in advance of their visit.
Engagement by choice
Invite users to ‘choose their own adventure’ depending on their time and interests.
Tiers of engagement
Serving all audiences from the curious to the informed, we wanted to create successful experiences based on audience profiles.
Skim // 10 seconds
Audience: casual browser
Experience approach: Instagram feed-like UX - one main scroll through
Content strategy: top-level, brief insights
Swim // 30 seconds
Audience: art enthusiast
Experience approach: users engage with more horizontal interactive modules
Content strategy: an additional layer of information on the topic(s)
Dive // 2 minutes
Audience: art professional
Experience approach: users spent time reading, watching and immersing themselves in the experience.
Content strategy: an in-depth, multi-layered digital experience.
User testing our way through many, many assumptions.
We ran usability testing and contextual content testing to see if people were able to understand the story of the primer. We tested online and in the galleries and observed that some of our interactions were being missed by users. We observed that users paused when they were presented with something to engage with: interactive content.
How engagement drove our experience and content strategy.
During our initial launch we saw traffic primarily from mobile devices with most users coming directly at The Met website, followed by users directed from Google, and lastly through social.
For Play It Loud we saw the most engagement with the swim experience and interactive content. For In Praise of Painting, we saw low engagement with audio content but consistent focus on the interactive features. For The Last Knight, we saw higher engagement for the swim modules as well as the dive experience.
We saw that the highest engagement came from a more streamlined and compact experience with clear entries for interactive content so we focused on a robust Swim experience where we saw most of our users engaging and a fresh new approach to the tone of voice that parallels high-engagement media content.
We saw time spent on the primers increase from 1m57s to 3m47s and an increase of +300% in unique page views.
Webby and GLAMi awards nominations
Our first Primer received a Webby nomination in the Cultural Institutions category and a GLAMi awards nomination for exhibition experiences.