Case Study · 2025 · 8 weeks
TeleQuest
Every museum, in your pocket.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2025 · 8 weeks
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Maze
Platform
iOS Mobile App
The world's greatest cultural institutions are physically inaccessible to most of the world.
Geographic distance, cost, disability, and time all create barriers to cultural access. A student in Mumbai, a wheelchair user in Sydney, or someone working three jobs in Chicago all face the same wall: the world's greatest museums are theoretically public, but practically inaccessible.
TeleQuest was designed to close that gap — not by digitising museums as flat catalogues, but by creating a genuinely exploratory experience that captures the discovery and serendipity of physical museum visits.
Discovery, not browsing, is the core value of museums
Users don't visit museums with a list. They wander, stumble, and discover. Existing virtual museum tools destroyed this by presenting exhibits as searchable databases. TeleQuest had to recreate the wander.
Context transforms an object into a story
Research showed that visitors remembered objects they had context for at a rate 4x higher than those they didn't. The app needed to deliver context — history, provenance, related objects — without overwhelming.
Mobile-first meant rethinking navigation
Desktop virtual tours use mouse-driven spatial navigation that breaks on mobile. The interaction model needed to be rebuilt from touch-first principles, not ported from desktop.
Competitive analysis
Audited 9 existing virtual museum experiences across web and mobile. Identified a consistent pattern: technical capability prioritised over discovery experience.
Journey mapping
Mapped the emotional journey of a physical museum visit and identified the moments of discovery, wonder, and connection that digital equivalents were failing to reproduce.
Interaction prototyping
Tested three navigation paradigms — map-based, swipe-based, and curated-path — before landing on a hybrid model that allowed both structured exploration and serendipitous discovery.
Content architecture
Designed a layered content model: primary object, contextual detail, and related objects. Each layer is revealed progressively, preventing overload while rewarding curiosity.
Layered content over immediate information density
The choice
Progressive disclosure of exhibit information across three depth levels
The reason
Early testing with information-dense screens produced cognitive overload and reduced engagement. Layered disclosure let curious users go deep while giving casual users a satisfying surface-level experience.
Curated paths alongside free exploration
The choice
Thematic 'quests' that string related exhibits into a narrative journey
The reason
Free exploration without any structure produced disorientation in unfamiliar collections. Curated quests gave users a thread to follow while still allowing detours — mirroring how a good museum guide works.
Museum Explorer
Browse exhibits from institutions worldwide through a card-based discovery interface. A gentle algorithm surfaces exhibits based on dwell time and interaction — the more you explore, the better it knows your interests.
Exhibit Deep Dive
Tap any exhibit for a layered experience: title and period at a glance, historical context on scroll, related objects and provenance in a drawer. Three levels of depth, one clean interface.
Thematic Quests
Curated narrative paths through related exhibits — 'The Silk Road', 'Women in Science', 'Colonial Legacies'. Each quest is designed to produce a specific emotional and intellectual journey.
Outcomes
- +
Navigation model tested with 8 participants — 7 of 8 completed exploration tasks without assistance
- +
Layered content approach reduced reported cognitive overload vs. information-dense baseline by 60%
- +
Quest feature had highest satisfaction rating across all tested features
- +
Accessibility audit passed for colour contrast and screen reader compatibility
Reflection
Eight weeks was not enough time to fully develop the social and sharing dimensions of the app — there's a compelling opportunity around shared quests and collaborative collection-building that I only sketched. If I continued this project, that's where I'd focus.