Art Institute of Chicago
My Museum Tour: Bridging the gap between online and in-person visits
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Facilitating exploration, creation, and sharing of museum tours
Built within the Art Institute of Chicago’s existing Twill CMS powered website
Utilising and extending Art Institute of Chicago's public APIs
Founded in 1879 as both a school and a museum, and housing a permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art, the Art Institute of Chicago is renowned worldwide as a leading fine-arts institution.
Cogapp worked alongside the Art Institute of Chicago's design, marketing, and technical teams to develop an online platform aimed at boosting in-person engagement. This platform allows users to explore curated tours selected by the museum or create their own personalized tours for themselves, friends, or family.
Consisting of two key elements: the Tour Builder and the 'Tour Viewer' on the Art Institute of Chicago's website, My Museum Tour exemplifies how digital solutions can enrich and enhance the in-gallery experience.
Building a better online world for visitors
The Art Institute of Chicago encompasses 273 galleries spanning 52,200 m² (562,000 square feet). Despite attracting many first-time visitors, navigating its vast collection and building can be challenging for newcomers and regulars alike.
Insights from visitor research shaped the project's goals and objectives. Many visitors feel overwhelmed by the extensive collection and the museum's size. Recommendations from friends and family often guide visits, with popular options like the 'What to see in an hour' self-guided tour.
These insights informed our approach throughout the design and development phases.
With the launch of the 'My Museum Tour' feature, developed over several weeks of collaboration between The Art Institute of Chicago and Cogapp, visitors can now personalise their experience, creating custom self-guided tours with favourite artworks or themed collections to share with others.
Finding ways into the collection
To address visitor challenges, a generous and supportive platform has been developed to enhance the museum experience.
The aim is to make visitors feel at home with the collection and comfortable navigating tours or creating their own.
A streamlined interface with just the right amount of choice is key. Tours feature items currently on view in the galleries, and the Tour Builder offers a curated subset of artworks, all visible during a visit. Artworks are grouped by themes to engage and guide visitors effectively.
The Tour Builder's search experience, inspired by the collection search, provides a well-rounded selection of themes, ensuring good coverage while remaining user-friendly.
Facilitating recommendations
The ready-made tours offer visitors curated selections of artworks, each catering to specific interests, themes, or seasonal events.
For those designing their own tours, the platform provides customization options to enhance the experience. Users can name a specific recipient and add notes to each chosen artwork, which can be general or personalized for the recipient.
Making the most of a visit
Wayfinding is an ongoing challenge that the museum continuously works to improve. While creating tours for visitors, this challenge is a significant consideration, extending beyond the project's scope. However, the presentation of tour artworks is designed to ease navigation, with artworks organized to guide visitors naturally through their journey.
By limiting each tour to just six artworks, we help ensure that visitors can complete their tours without feeling they missed out, even if time is short.
Technical approach
Cogapp has been crafting innovative solutions for leading cultural organizations for four decades. This project marks the second time Cogapp has worked within the The Art Institute of Chicago's Twill CMS. While we did not handle the original implementation, our extensive experience allowed us to quickly integrate and develop a solution that seamlessly aligns with the existing technology stack.
The development of this new set of features involved several updates and additions to the existing infrastructure:
Modifications to Laravel/Twill on the main website and API to support the 'Tour Display'
Creation of a new React-based 'Tour Builder' application
Implementation of a new PostgreSQL database for storing the tours
A home for the Tours
This exciting new feature is displayed through a rich landing page that showcases existing ‘ready-made' tours and also invites visitors to create their own.
The landing page is fully customizable within the Twill CMS, giving content editors the power to select and arrange the tours displayed. Even though the tour content is stored in a separate database, a custom Laravel Model and Controller seamlessly integrate this content with the CMS front-end.
The main site updates include direct integration with Laravel/Twill, allowing the Art Institute of Chicago's content editors to effortlessly customize the page using their existing CMS experience.
For each tour item, we combine data from the tours database with additional metadata about the location of each artwork. This enhances the information available on artwork placement and optimizes the tour order, reducing the need for visitors to detour or backtrack frequently.
Tour Builder
The Tour Builder now operates as a standalone React application, utilizing the Art Institute's existing public API to search and display artworks. It also integrates with a new API endpoint developed by Cogapp for saving tours. This approach builds on the excellent work of the Art Institute of Chicago's team and aligns with their technical strategy, enhancing maintainability and consistency.
As mentioned, this application interacts with the Art Institute of Chicago's public API. This, in conjunction with its re-use of components and behaviours from other parts of the AIC site, ensures display of the new interface is seamless for anyone creating a tour.
Quality is a top priority. To ensure rigorous testing, we have implemented Cypress component testing for granular automated checks and automated integration testing for the entire app. The test suite runs automatically as part of the GitHub Actions workflow, ensuring continuous quality assurance even after our project concludes. This integrated testing process prevents accidental introduction of breaking changes by future developers.
Safe storage
The new PostgresSQL database stores all data for the tours. As the tours are effectively user-generated content and not directly required in the CMS, they are stored in their own database rather than sharing the CMS database. This distinction has many benefits including simple separation of concerns as well as a level of security insulation for the existing website database.
Creating an environment where everyone can do their best work
Cogapp is pleased to continue its collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, building on our previous work together. We previously created a bespoke Layered Image Viewer for the Institute's digital publications and hosted a hackday to explore innovative ideas for their online collection. With this experience, we embarked on the 'My Museum Tour' project working with familiar faces and technologies, but with deeper collaboration across design, marketing, and tech departments.
Our robust project management and production processes ensure seamless team alignment and high-quality delivery. Our shared tools bridge geographic divides, supporting a highly productive Agile workflow.
We prioritize transparency and structured feedback by conducting bi-weekly demonstrations of our progress. Continuous communication is maintained through shared Slack channels and regular Zoom meetings, keeping all project teams closely connected.
The Art Institute of Chicago My Museum Tour
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