I have a contentious relationship with my phone at the best of times. Admittedly I'm fairly cheap so I tend to have older phones with a fairly limited data package. This means that it fills me with nothing but dread when a museum pushes that I should really download their app.
On the face of it it makes perfect sense. Why go through the expense of audio guides when everyone has a device in their pocket that can already do that.
Apps can also do so much more, you can stock as much information as you want on there including videos, interactive elements, links and resources. All of which can of course be accessed without actually being at the museum at all. The possibilities are endless.
Image of The MET App (Taken from Museum Strategy)
The problem is that your app isn't like that at all*. Firstly the Internet won't be up to snuff meaning that it will take forever to download and the pictures and videos won't really load. The information blocks to any particular exhibit also don't really tell me anything the plaque doesn't already and there nothing about that one artifact in really interested in.
There is technically the full museum catalogue available to me, but it's little more than a list of items titles with obvious descriptions and an identification number. Plus when I click to try and find out more the webpage it links me to is broken.
The story behind these apps is generally the same. At some point somebody important decided an app should be made and they allocated an amount of money that was too small to hire somebody who did it in a month and then it's hardly been touched since.
The problem is that apps are not something you can set and forget like information cards in a display. They are living things that need time, effort, and more money than most people expect. Otherwise the impression is that of an interactive space where half the exhibits have a paper ‘out of order’ sign.
A museum app can be a genuinely useful and transformative tool that adds enormous value. But to get to that point you need a fully dedicated app team that is probably outside the scope of all but the largest of institutions.
There is definitely potential for an ‘app first’ museum model perhaps with exciting missions objectives, personalized guided tours etc. This is the kind of thing being spearheaded by immersive experiences such as Phantom Peak but we need to be careful not to end up relying on the app that ends up non-functional.
This is perhaps a great use case for AI. I'm personally not an advocate for AI but within the controlled and limited environment of a museum and with a model that has been trained on the collection (and somehow made not to constantly lie) the idea of a personal AI museum tour guide ala Dan Brown's Origin is a possibility. But perhaps let's not get ahead of ourselves with that idea just yet.
* I mean, your app might be. But chances are it’s not.
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