Designing a museum for everyone

One museum, many ways of experiencing it

How do you design a digital museum experience that works for everyone? Finding an artwork, understanding what you are looking at, or simply knowing where you are can be radically different experiences depending on who is visiting. Accessibility is the whole point, and it’s damn complex.

Some people need detailed descriptions, while others find the same amount of information overwhelming. Some rely on screen readers, while others prefer to read. What makes an experience accessible to one person can make it harder for someone else.

So we started with a different question: can an interface adapt to people, rather than asking people to adapt to the interface?

Design for all ≠ one Design for everyone

Together with MAXXI, Isagog and Ecosistemica, we developed MAXXI AI: a digital experience designed to make museum content and spaces more accessible.

Instead of asking visitors to identify through disability categories, the interface lets them configure how they prefer to interact. These preferences become part of the system context. From there, visitors can talk with the museum through a conversational AI.

The result is a hybrid interaction: system-driven during configuration, user-driven during conversation.

Designing with, testing with, redesigning with

We used co-design to explore what the experience could, couldn't and should do.
User stories became conversation starters between designers, developers, museum staff, accessibility experts and people with different disabilities.
Those conversations shaped the first prototype and then an MVP, which we tested with people with visual, hearing and cognitive disabilities.

Each usability session uncovered new contradictions. Each contradiction became another design iteration.

Accessibility is a conversation

Testing progressively transformed the interface. Ambiguous Yes/No choices became explicit options. "Help" became SOS. Conversation history was redesigned to balance cognitive load with the possibility of retrieving previous information.

AI introduced new challenges too. Waiting for an answer can itself become an accessibility issue.
We therefore explored textual feedback, audio cues and screen-reader focus management to make the system status understandable throughout the conversation.

Accessibility became part of the interaction logic itself.

But where am I?

Accessible content is only part of the experience. Visitors still need to understand where they are and how to reach their destination. We developed a testing app and experimented with Bluetooth beacons to map signal strength throughout MAXXI.

Designing for everyone means accepting contradictions

MAXXI AI highlighted a simple tension: there is no single accessible experience.
What provides useful context to one visitor can become noise for another.
Universal design therefore doesn't necessarily mean one interface that fits all.
It can also mean designing a system capable of listening, adapting and giving people control over how they experience the museum.