Supporting the in-gallery experience on mobile devices

The mobile-optimised website launched by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September, was specifically designed to support the physical visitor to the Museum and to enhance their in-gallery experience.  To achieve this we undertook a user-centered design process that included a number of iterations moving from low-fi paper prototyping, through to testing a fully working version of the site with visitors in the Museum.

In this paper we look at the vision that inspired the mobile version of metmuseum.org;  how we implemented the iterative user testing approach; the findings from our testing that were incorporated into the mobile version and the technical implementation that enables a mobile optimised site to be built using the content generated for the main site.