Improving the ticket kiosks at the Met

I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year and picked up my tickets via the ticketing kiosks in the Great Hall. I noticed what I thought were several UX problems that merited further investigation.

So I visited the Met several times over a three week period, on different days of the week, to observe and measure how people were interacting with the kiosks to try and identify and measure some of the problems they were running into.

The issues

It seemed to me that a number of the screens were very busy, probably causing unnecessary cognitive load for the users and slowing down the ticketing process. Moreover, I noticed many people simply abandoning their sessions, and due to very long timeout settings, the kiosks sat idle as confused visitors avoided them. I also noticed quite a few people who had to engage the bar code scanner having difficulties completing the task, even when they ultimately succeeded in producing a successful scan.

Recommendations

I found several instances where default selections or input options were not set up optimally, requiring unnecessary actions on the part of the users. I created several mock-ups of suggested alternatives or fixes to make the process easier and simpler.

Changes to task flow

I also recommended simplifying the content and making the non-English choices more visible on the initial screen to attract more users. I also thought the information overload on some of the screens could be alleviated through a revised task map that broke up the steps more discretely and presented the choices in simpler chunks to the users.

Read my full case study for my complete analysis and about how I went about doing the research on Medium.