Media Guide System
enabling museums to build and host bespoke exhibition guides in-house

The Archaeological State Museum of Baden-Württemberg (ALM BW) operates as a decentralized network comprising a main museum, a central artifact archive, and seven branch museums across the state. The main museum and one of its branch institutions required new media guide solutions to enhance the visitor experience on site.

As in-house Digital Managerin für User Experience at the main museum in Constance, I developed a concept for a content management system (CMS) specifically designed for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The goal was to enable each museum to independently create, host, and maintain its own media guides—without relying on costly native apps or proprietary hardware. The solution follows a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) approach, making it lightweight, cost-efficient, and highly scalable. Because PWAs are system-independent and run in any modern browser, they are also more resilient to technical maintenance issues like OS-level updates.

I designed the CMS interface to build on familiar patterns from traditional museum audio guides, using index numbers as an intuitive point of reference for visitors. These can be connected to modular content types—such as audio, video, and text—and dynamically linked to objects in the digital collection. This allows for seamless transitions from in-exhibition interpretation to deeper online content.

For the frontend UI, I extended the existing design system of the museum’s digital platform, adding dedicated components and a dark mode specifically tailored for interactive educational formats.

In addition to the index-based system, I explored an alternative AR-enhanced guide format that allows visitors to navigate exhibitions using their smartphones. Based on the Matterport platform and photogrammetry technology, this solution offers spatial orientation within a scanned 3D environment—making it easier for users to locate specific objects and enhancing overall wayfinding.