Overview
Docents are volunteer tour guides at the Getty museums who connect with people, inspiring a love of art and shaping memorable experiences of the architecture and gardens at the Getty Center and Getty Villa.
Challenge
The Getty came to Digital Cheetah to create a brand new custom Wordpress site for their docents to use are their main source of information, communication, and scheduling. They wanted a way to help manage and stay in touch with their docents, the tour guides at both of the Getty locations. We several discovery meetings with the Getty business team and figured out what they needed. They were looking for a custom Wordpress theme consistent to their public facing branding plus a custom tool to manage and schedule museum tours using a rotation of docents.
The Goal was to allow for an easy consumption of information on the Wordpress side as well as an easy user flow for the docents to manage their own tour schedules. This would allow for an open dialogue about each tour and it’s docents. If there was a scheduling conflict or a lack of information related to a school tour taking place, the schedule was meant to be a tool for this purpose.
Audience
This tool was built for the Getty docents. Docents will view a daily schedule of tours and a list of other docent’s assigned to these tours. Registration admins have the ability to assign tours to docents. The Docent Program welcomes diverse applicants who are eager to share their creativity and passion with students and visitors from around the world. They are committed to the ideals of generosity, inclusivity, truth, and the belief that the docent corps should be representative of the great diversity of Los Angeles. Docents do not need an art degree or any artistic training. All they need is a passion to connect visitors and students with the Getty museums and the visual arts through shared experiences.
Role
I was the lead product and visual designer on this project in collaboration with another designer, project managers, and Getty staff. From start to finish, I worked on the look and feel as well as the functionality including user flow, wireframes, lo-fi prototypes, and eventually a pixel perfect product.
Process
This project was broken up into two parts working in tandem. The first task was the Wordpress site which would house all the resources and content for the Docents to educate themselves. The other half of the project was the custom schedule tool which would be used by admins and docents alike.
After many discussions and meetings with the Getty business team, I had the basic structure of the Wordpress site. I needed to organize the site in a way that was intuitive and allowed the Docents to navigate the resources. They needed to quickly learn about the tours and art objects that they would be speaking about to tour guests.
User Flow
Eventually, the user flow was locked down and then we moved on to the Wordpress site with detailed wireframes. Using Sketch, the other designer and I created several "object page" templates that would work with a variety of resources. Some rich media would include video, mp3 files, soundcloud plugins, podcasts, and downloadable resources. All of this needed to be considered when creating the design for the object pages.
Basic Wireframes
Designing the docent scheduler tool, there were two aspects that needed to be considered. The admin view and the docent view. The admins had the ability to copy shifts, add and remove shifts, add tags and notes to either the day, the tour, or the individual docent. All this needed to be readily available and intuitive because these would be a daily tool. Before we created this tool, the Getty team was using Excel spreadsheets to manage the docents schedules.
Custom Scheduling Tool
Outcome
Still in Production