Audio Tours for Multiple Museums in a Single App

We are currently in the late development stages the Amuze app. The app is in good shape, and we will now engage in extensive testing to make sure that the user truly has an enjoyable experience when using it.
Audio tours have been developed for five different museums around the world.

• Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco
• Louvre in Paris
• Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
• Uffizi Museum in Florence
• Vatican Museums in Rome

​We started with these museums because we are very familiar with them, and they display some of the greatest art in the world. It will also allow us to test the app with users from around the world and with a diverse set of interests in art.

Once launched, the app will be available on iOS and Android. While we have taken the utmost care in developing an app without bugs, this is a very challenging task. Testing the app on iPhones is relatively simple as there are only a limited number of models available. However, the total number of Android-based phones is very large, and this requires extensive testing.

An additional challenge is that users will need internet access to download the audio tours. The most reliable way to get access to the full tours is to have a reliable internet connection, like most of us have at home. Once the tour is downloaded, you can use the app without any internet connection. However, some people may only start downloading the tour when they are in the museum. And this provides an additional challenge. Some museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have great Wi-Fi available. But others, like the Louvre, do not have reliable Wi-Fi networks throughout their museum. It is not that they don’t want that. It is just much more challenging to provide a reliable Wi-Fi network in a centuries-old marble building.

To address these challenges, we use a lean design for the app. We try to only include the essentials for you to better enjoy your museum visit. This way, the app is easier to download, and the content of each audio tour can be downloaded quicker.

On this blog, we will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments of the Amuze app.

Cheers, Eelco