Wayfinding is a common problem among museums, and you might think it's necessary to spend a lot of time and resources to devise the perfect solution. The floorplan at the Met is quite complex, so when we set out to build a map feature for the Met App, we knew it would be a formidable challenge. If that weren't enough, our small team had only a short period of time to design and develop a mobile map that could be used on two native platforms, and, most importantly, would be useful for our visitors. Instead of spending months building a product that we think our visitors want, we decided to build a minimum viable product (MVP) that our visitors could be using sooner rather than later. We then used a build-measure-learn feedback loop to iterate and perfect the Map to improve the day to day experience of our visitors. We will discuss the process behind building the Met App Map, and we'll share what we learned along the way.

1. Building a Map for The
Met app
Spencer Kiser and Subathra Thanabalan
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2. Apps and API

3. The Met App

4. App Store Reviews

5. App Store Reviews

6. Museum Print Map

7. Website Map

8. Met App Map

9. Tech Stack

10. Indoor Mapping

11. World Map Projection
GeoTIFF is a public
domain metadata
standard which
allows
georeferencing
information to be
embedded within a
TIFF file.

12. World Map Projection

13. Upload Tiles

14. (X,Y) to (Lat,Long)

15. Pros
Speed to market
Reusable
Using existing workflows

16. Cons
Not a vector map
Not available offline
Not ready for indoor positioning

17. App Store Reviews

18. Sessions
Map
Search the
Collection
Audio
Guide

19. Session Lengths

20. User Feedback
Font is fuzzy
No offline mode
No positioning / blue dot

21. Next Steps
System redesign
Digital first
Launch Spring 2016 (tentative)

22. Learn More
“Mapping User Feedback on the Met App”
http://bit.ly/1rc9pnW
“Building an indoor map with Mapbox”
http://bit.ly/1RmyB4t
@spenczar
@subzthanabalan