Design an app that helps a museum make money.

Clarification & Understanding

Right off the bat this strikes me as very vague so let's try to dig a little deeper. What is our rationale for doing this? Does it align with some larger strategic goal? No, it does not. Help museums make money.

Is this app going to be a standalone offering or can we go ahead and leverage some of Google's existing offerings? It can either be a whole new product or integrate into one of Google's existing offerings.

Does it need to be a specific type of app? Desktop, mobile, or web? No.

What is our definition of a museum? A museum is a collection of interesting exhbits? Is an aquarium or a zoo a museum? Yes, they are. The exhibits are just living.

User Segments

There are two defined sets of users here, one set is all of the different museums and museum personel who will be leveraging the app to make money and the other set is the end user or the museum patron. I think within each of these different sets of users there are additional segments we can explore as follows:

Museums:

1. Large National Musuems: These are well known and well staffed organizations with a lot of exhbibits. Think of the MOMA or the Met.
2. Medium Sized Regional Museums: Still well staffed and funded, but not going to have any international appeal or the type of volume of a large national museum. Think Pittsburg museum of Science.
3. Niche Museums: These are much smaller in scale and tend to focus on more niche topics. For example, the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA.

Patrons:

1. Tourists: Visiting the area on vacation, didn't vacation there because of the museum but think it would be worth looking at while there.
2. Afficionado: Very well versed and interested in the topic the museum is about, may be a repeat visitor excited about a new exhibit.
3. Field Trips: Organized trips planned by a school or camp with a large number of children and a few chaperones.
4. Families: Parents and their kids taking day trips, probably on the weekend.

Out of the above user segments, I'm going to suggest we focus on the school field trip user segment. My rationale here is that schools have budgets dedicated to field trips and if our goal is to focus on monetization it might be easier to get a piece of that money already earmarked for spending on such activities.

Pain Points

With the school field trip use case there are a few different user personas, the student, the teacher, and the chaperone. I'm going to suggest we focus on the teacher because that is who is ultimately going to be the decision maker when it comes to the field trip.

1. It's tough to keep track of so many students at once outside of the classroom
2. Are the students paying attention, how do you know if they've learned anything?
3. Want the students to be excited and enjoy going to the museum instead of having it feel like a chore
4. Need to plan a structured lesson or activity around being at the museum

Solutions

1. Student Tracker - We could offer the ability for the teacher to have her students download a mobile app, which would then grant the teacher permission to see their location overlayed on top of a map of the museum. This way the teacher could ensure that all of their students are inside of the museum and at one of the appropriate exhibits. If coordinating app downloads amongst students is difficult or the students don't have phones then perhaps the museum could dole out wristbands with sensors upon arrival and only the teacher would need to download the app. The downside here is that if the students really wanted to play hooky or go somewhere they weren't supposed to they could just give their wristband or phone to one of their friends.
2. Treasure Hunting Game - In order to keep the students engaged on the trip and learning, we could offer patrons an mobile treasure hunting game. As students open up the app, they would be presented with a hint or a clue about a particular exhibit which they would then have to go find to unlock the treasure. For example, if the museum's exhibit was based upon Ancient Egypt then the hint could be something like "The God of the Sun beholds your next clue". The students would then either find the Ra exhibit for the next clue if they knew the answer or they would search around the museum and read the exhibits until they learned who the God of the Sun was. This could either be a competition where the student or group who answers the most questions first wins, or there could be some final reward at the end of the game.
3. Pre-Packaged Lesson Plans -  We could offer teachers pre-packaged lesson plans about our exhibits through a web application. The lessons would be organized, adjustable based upon grade level, and feature indepth details and footage about the topic being covered by the museum's experts. These lessons would be available online and teachers from all over the world could purchase them when covering an educational unit the museum has had an exhibit. This would not be limited to current exhibits, because we can obviously save and archive the content so our library of lesson plans would increase over time.

Prioritization

I'm assuming we don't have the bandwidth or resources to build out all of the solutions above in parallel, so let's go ahead and pick one to focus on. To help us with this, I'm going to use a comparison matrix:

Customer Satisfaction, Ease of Implementation, Monetizability

1. C+, B+, C-

2. A, B, B+

3. A, B-, A

I am not a huge fan of solution #1. It strikes me as marginally useful and doesn't fully address pain point #1. You would still need chaperones available to monitor the students and if they were really devious as mentioned above they could just give their phone or wristband to one of their friends. Additionally, since it is only marginally useful I couldn't see users really paying that much for it. One of the upsides is that I could see it easily being bundled into the cost of a field trip.

I really like solution #2. I think this would be a nifty feature that both the teachers and the students would enjoy. Furthermore, I could definitely see museum patrons paying for this. I know museums have had success in the past charging additional for premium exhibits or experiences, like the imax theater at the Musem of Science in Boston.

Out of the above features, I'm going to suggest we prioritize building solution #3. Ultimately, our goal here is monetization and the other two solutions provide the ability to further monetize patrons who are already at the museum, this solution is different in the sense that it gives us the ability to monetize users who aren't even physically located near the museum. The total addressable market for solution #3 will be orders of magnitude bigger than the other solutions. 

Summary

In order to increase the monetization capability of museums, we are going to focus on the student / classroom user segment and offer the ability for teachers to purchase Pre-Packaged Lesson plans about the museums current and past exhibits through an online web application.

This directly aligns with Google's mission statement of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. We are taking all of the really captivating information available at our in person exhibits and digitizing in a consumable format thus making it available to way more people beyond just the museum's patrons.

Metrics

We need at least two different metrics to help us assess whether or not our solution is a success. 

1. The first metric should be related to whether or not our solution actually does a good job of addressing the pain point of teachers needing to spend time writing up and creating quality lesson plans around the exhibits' topics that their students will actually learn from. One possible metric is the number of teachers purchasing lesson plans, but we also want to assess whether or not the students are learning from our lesson plans so a better metric would be the number of students who receive passing grades. For a student to receive a passing grade their teacher must have purchased the lesson plan so this metric would also serve as a proxy for the first metric. By offering different quiz and test modules through our web application we would be able to gather this data. 
2. The second metric should address whether or not we've succeeded in our overarching goal, does our solution help museums make money? I would measure this by the amount of revenue we receive. I think in the long term profit would obviously be a more important monetization metric to focus on, but there is going to be a large initial upfront cost for this solution while we digitize artifacts and build out all of the different content needed for the lesson plans. Our content library will be reusable and grow over time so our profit margin will greatly increase going forward.