Rijksmuseum mobile first: redesign Rijksstudio & the new Rijksmuseum app

Published paper: Rijksmuseum mobile first: Rijksstudio Redesign and the new Rijksmuseum app

Four and a half years ago, the Rijksmuseum launched the successful website Rijksmuseum.nl and the digital concept Rijksstudio, which became the cultural digital heritage benchmark for connecting people and the collection. Today, with over 325,000 works of art, 360,000 accounts, more than 2,000,000 free downloads, and 200,000 personal collections, Rijksstudio continues to grow.
Over the past two years, we have witnessed an increasing shift in the market towards mobile. The Rijksmuseum is responding to this trend with a major redesign of Rijksstudio and the new Rijksmuseum app.
After the redesign, Rijksstudio presents personal collections compiled by users, together with stories from the Rijksmuseum in the same simple and mobile-first visual template. And publishing them literally next to each other is our way of showing that we are OPEN online.
The Rijksmuseum wants to seize the opportunities mobile has to offer with a new state-of-the-art app (launch January 2018). It consists of three main sections:
1. Rijksstudio
2. Multimedia tours
3. E-tickets
With the new app, you can enjoy the Rijksmuseum collection wherever you are: in a train, at home on the couch, or in the museum taking a multimedia tour. The app offers one simple way of enjoying the collection for everyone, whenever, wherever. “Swiping” through the collection and personal Rijksstudio collections, and browsing through the museum itself, is a similar experience, since the museum’s multimedia tours are fully integrated in the app. It is all one intuitive user art experience.
An important part of the new app is the innovative indoor automatic wayfinding that is fully integrated with our multimedia tours. This platform uses an interactive map and tailor-made automatic wayfinding directions for the museum site. The app will always know where you are by means of 300 iBeacons that have been placed invisibly in the museum. With this new infrastructure, the app can guide you to and from any location.

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