App for the Grande Museo del Duomo

The world's largest collection of Florentine monumental sculpture: medieval and Renaissance statues and reliefs in marble, bronze and silver by the greatest artists of their time. Most of these masterpieces were made for the exteriors and interiors of the religious buildings that still stand in front of the Museum: the Baptistery of San Giovanni, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Giotto's Bell Tower. The Museo dell'Opera's specific mission is to properly present the works made for these buildings, which together form what is now called the Grande Museo del Duomo.

For the new Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, we were commissioned to design and build a mobile app to give future visitors the best possible support.

The app serves two types of visitors: those physically visiting the Museo dell'Opera, and virtual visitors who, though not on site, want to take a virtual tour of the rooms and the works on display.

The museum visit is available in two modes: standard or LIVE (assisted mode), in which the app automatically detects the visitor's position and the room they are in, giving the fastest possible access to the entries for the works they are looking at.

We chose beacons, which use Bluetooth to let users with the app installed on any mobile device (Android or iOS smartphone or tablet) receive information about the works in the room they are visiting.

We built a dedicated CMS that gives the museum's curators full control over the information and the layout of the rooms across all three floors, as well as the placement of works within each room, which will change over time as works travel on loan to other museums around the world.

We paid close attention to the app's usability, building an interactive prototype to validate the choices and features we had envisioned. The result is an app that feels immediate and natural, with each feature explained in an introductory tutorial that guides users as they discover the app and the Museum.

Both we and the client are fully satisfied with the outcome and how the project ran. We worked in complete sync with the Opera del Duomo team, becoming a single development team. The work followed our agile development model with continuous communication, met every deadline and came in under the project budget.

The app project is only just beginning, since we built it as a pure MVP (minimum viable product). Now we can validate users' needs in the field, gather feedback and decide which improvements and new features to add, based on what the Museum's visitors need.