The problem
The National Museum of Saudi Arabia opened in January 1999, inside the King Abdulaziz Historical Center in Al-Murabba. It was inaugurated to mark a hundred years since King Abdulaziz took Riyadh in 1902. Eight galleries, designed by Raymond Moriyama in forms borrowed from the Red Sands dunes outside the city. Pre-Islamic Arabia. The Prophet's mission. The first and second Saudi states. The unification. The two holy mosques. The kind of collection a country only builds once.
A quarter century in, the role has changed. The museum now sits inside the Museums Commission. It sits inside Vision 2030. It's one of the institutions the country is leaning on as it builds a cultural tourism sector that barely existed a decade ago. The volume followed. The visitors are mixed. A first-time tourist on a new e-visa. A returning Saudi family. A curator from abroad. A school group on a field trip from Diriyah. All walking through the same doors within ten minutes of one another.
And every one of them got the same printed sheet.
That was the brief, more or less. A great place held back by the tools it had to greet you with. The team knew it. They didn't have a way out. No internal product team. No analytics. No clear sense of who was even walking through the door.
You can't design for visitors you can't see.
What we found in the first two weeks
Before we wrote a line of code, we spent time on the ground. Watching how people moved through the galleries. Talking to the front-of-house team. Sitting with curators and the digital department. A few patterns showed up fast.
- Visitors arrive with different goals. A tourist with three hours wants the highlights. A returning local wants to know what's new. A teacher wants something pegged to the curriculum. A researcher wants depth on one gallery. None of them were well served by the same printed map.
- The team had no way to learn from any of it. No analytics. No surveys. No follow-up. Decisions about programming, layout, and seasonal exhibits got made on instinct and tradition. Sometimes that's right. Often it's expensive.
- Whatever we built had to live without us. The museum was clear from the first conversation. The team needed to own it, run it, and grow from it. No black-box vendor lock-in.
The decisions that shaped the product
A lot of museum tech projects start with a flashy mobile app and end with a download counter that never moves. We didn't want to build that. So we made a few calls early. The rest of the work followed from them.
1. Meet visitors on-site, not through an app store.
We put the experience on large, clean kiosk screens at the entrances. That's when intent is highest. The visitor is already there. They're already curious. No download, no account, no sign-up. A screen that says “let's figure out what kind of visit you're here for,” then gets out of the way.
2. Ask the smallest number of questions that produces a good answer.
We tested versions with one question. With three. With seven. We landed on a short sequence of honest, human questions. Who are you here with. What draws you in. How much time do you have. The kind of thing the front-of-house team would ask if they could talk to every guest.
3. No data we don't need.
No accounts. No emails captured by default. No tracking that follows a visitor home. The museum already has the relationship. We needed to make this visit work better, nothing more. What we do store is aggregated and anonymous. Patterns, not profiles.
4. Build the team's tool too.
Half the value of this project wasn't on the visitor-facing screen. It was in giving the team a window into who was coming, when, and what was keeping them. So we built an internal dashboard with the same care as the public product. If the team doesn't use it, the data may as well not exist.
What changed
After launch, three things shifted at the same time. Each one is worth pulling apart.
For visitors: a visit that fits.
Someone drawn to ancient civilizations gets a different route than someone here for Islamic art or the founding of the Kingdom. A visitor with an hour gets the highlights. Someone with half a day gets depth. None of it requires the guest to know anything about the museum's catalogue. They say what interests them. The product does the translating.
For the team: a window they've never had.
The museum can see which galleries hold attention, when peak hours fall, which visitor types come back, and where the journey drops off. None of that existed before. It changes what conversations are possible inside the building. About programming. About layout. About staffing.
For the institution: a digital foundation they own.
We shipped the product. We also shipped a clean codebase, full documentation, and a runbook the team can pick up from. Future work doesn't require us. That was the deal from day one.
The product is the visible part. The platform underneath is the part that compounds.
What we'd tell anyone in a similar position
If you work in a cultural institution, a government agency, or any organisation where the digital layer lags behind the physical experience, a few of these patterns might be useful even if you never work with us.
- Start where intent is highest. On-site, in the moment, is a better place to invest than a mobile app you have to convince anyone to download.
- Personalisation doesn't need an account. A few honest questions go a long way. You don't need to know who someone is to give them a better visit.
- If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Basic, privacy-respecting analytics turn instinct into a conversation about evidence.
- Own the codebase. Whatever you build, demand a clean handover. Software you can't maintain becomes software you have to replace.
Working on something like this?
We take on a few projects each quarter.
Cultural institutions, government agencies, businesses that need their digital layer to catch up with the rest of what they do. If that's you, get in touch.
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