A UX Reality Check at the ROM
HLOs: 
Article by Jasleen Kaur & Vishali Shiju (3rd year Digital Business Management BComm students)
Recently, the Digital Business Management students got the chance get a hands-on tour of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). The tour provided an amazing opportunity for students to learn beyond the classroom and study how historic art and innovation can affect worldview.
Students as groups, got the chance to look at natural history, ancient civilizations, modern designs and various relics from around the world, trying to make connections between various themes found. They also got to interact with Fashion Management program students and work together as a team. The museum helped students to think out of the box, get fresh ideas and become aware of various architectural designs promoting curiosity and collaboration. It served as an amazing opportunity to build real life connections and get more exposure.
Our visit to the Royal Ontario Museum opened our eyes to how even a globally renowned institution can struggle with user experience design.
Our first task before the visit was to download the ROM app – and for a good reason. The app was huge. It needed 5,666 MB of data to download before it could even be used, which is kind of insane. For a regular visitor, that alone would be enough to uninstall it immediately. It’s just not practical.
We checked the Play Store and App Store and saw that the app had only been downloaded by a couple hundred people – a tiny number compared to the millions who had visited the ROM in the past. Clearly, the app had very low visibility among visitors.
Awakening our inner detectives, we discovered that the app was developed by a Swedish company called Axiell. Upon digging further, we found their rating on a website called Software Advice, a 20-year-old review platform that gave us some deeper insight into the company. One of the reviewers mentioned that the app Axiell built for them was “not user-friendly for people who are not in data/cataloger/registrar roles,” which is basically almost every regular museum visitor.
That explained a lot. The ROM app does have a ton of information, the problem is the navigation. It’s not built with the average user in mind.
During our visit, we were assigned a task by Professor Hanadi to look for displays from our own country as a group and select two countries to explore. My group chose India and England. The first roadblock in our journey appeared right away: there was no search bar. Although we had a handy-dandy paper map of the museum, we still wanted to use the app to discover more. Unfortunately, because of its poor navigation, we had to rely on the paper map instead.
We soon discovered that even though the map said “Asia Pacific,” there were no displays from South Asia at all — which was disappointing. We thought that if the app had a feature at the beginning asking users about their area of interest or a specific country they wanted to explore, this kind of disappointment could easily be avoided.
Next, we moved on to England. There weren’t many digital experiences there — just a few booths where you could sit and listen to a historical anecdote about an artifact. The app also had similar audio features, but they were long and, honestly, a bit boring. We did find some interactive stations with video touchscreens and touchscreen tables that had games, which were interesting but sometimes confusing. Some didn’t have sound, and all of this wasn’t even mentioned in the app! These stations could attract a lot more visitors if the app highlighted them properly.
We also noticed tiny Qr Codes next to some artifacts. First of all, they were small and easy to miss. Second, if scanning them already gives information about the artifact, why would a visitor need a massive app that’s nearly 6 GB? It felt pretty pointless.
Overall, the in-person visit shed a lot of light on the shortcomings of the app and its poor UX design. It was not user-friendly at all. But the bright side was that it sparked a really engaging class discussion about how the app could be improved.
So far in class, we’ve learned to develop personas, ideate and brainstorm, build prototypes, and test usability — and this app clearly missed a lot of pain points and could use some serious remodeling. As for personas, they could definitely use one of us — lost Humber students trying to find our way around.
It was a great experience for us as Digital Business Management students, it showed us that even big organizations can face UX challenges — and how important it is to focus on empathy and usability when designing an app. Developers need to put themselves in the shoes of the user or visitor and follow the Design Thinking process properly, with research and testing to back it up.
For this hands-on experience that connected everything we’ve been learning in class, we’ll always be grateful to Professor Hanadi Alnawab for giving us this opportunity to see UX in action.
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