Fieldnote — Self-Guided Audio Tours for a History Museum
A volunteer project where our small design-for-good team built a simple, phone-based audio tour for a local history museum — designed in Figma with zero budget and a lot of secondhand headsets.
Role
Junior UX Designer · Volunteer Team
Timeframe
Team
Jordan Lee — Team lead & senior UX designer, mentored me through this one
Amara Okafor — Content writer for the tour scripts
Sam Patel — Front-end developer who built the actual site
Museum staff — Gave feedback on every gallery walkthrough
Problem
Through a local design-for-good program, I joined a small volunteer team helping a community history museum. As the most junior person on the team, I mostly took notes in our first few meetings — but the problem became clear fast: the museum has genuinely great stories, and most visitors read a couple of wall labels and leave within half an hour.
The museum already had an audio tour, but it ran on rental headsets that kept breaking, and almost nobody used them. We shadowed a Saturday of visitors and sketched a rough journey map on the whiteboard afterward to spot where interest dropped off.
Broken hardware: the old headsets were unreliable and expensive to maintain.
No Wi-Fi in the basement galleries, where some of the best exhibits live.
Older, less app-comfortable visitors who wouldn't want to download anything new.
Challenge
The museum's budget for this was basically zero, we could only meet on weekends, and I was still very new to designing for accessibility and lower-tech users. As the junior designer on the team, I was honestly nervous presenting my early wireframes to the museum staff.
My team lead encouraged me to bring even my roughest sketches to those meetings instead of waiting until things looked “finished” — that turned out to be some of the best design advice I've gotten so far.
Shadowing visitors on-site for a full Saturday
Low-fidelity paper wireframes, reviewed with museum staff every two weeks
A working prototype tested with 8 real visitors
Solution
We designed a web-based audio tour that opens straight from a QR code at the entrance — no app, no account. The whole tour downloads once at the entrance, so it keeps working even where the Wi-Fi doesn't reach.
Big stop numbers on the gallery floor that match big number buttons on screen.
Large-text transcripts for every stop, for visitors who'd rather read than listen.
No sign-up, no app — just scan and go.
I designed the screens in Figma using a simple two-column grid and a high-contrast type scale, since accessibility for older visitors was one of our top constraints. This was my first real project designing with accessibility as a primary requirement, not an afterthought.
Impact
We tested the prototype with 8 visitors over one weekend. 7 of them finished at least five stops, and a few asked when the “real” version would be available — which felt like a genuine win for a volunteer project. The museum is now recording audio for the first ten stops using our script and screen designs.
I learned how important it is to test in the actual physical space, not just on a laptop at home. A few of our screens that looked perfectly clear on my monitor were surprisingly hard to read in the museum's low gallery lighting.
visitors finished five or more stops during our one-weekend pilot test
7 of 8
now being recorded by museum staff using our script and screen designs
10 stops
the tour opens straight from a QR code, even in the low-signal basement galleries
No app download
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