Last Sunday I went to the recently reopened Kölnisches Stadtmuseum (Cologne City Museum). I did not know about the institution’s recent travails or anything in advance about its “new concept.”
As a historian I came away unimpressed by its walls of text, a dearth of objects, and the lack of proofreading the labels. (For example, a spectacular model of the city in the 16th century was mislabeled in English as depicting Cologne a “half century” ago, rather than half a millennium ago.) I did not care for the curation of the museum around “epoch-spanning question rooms” (epochenübergreifende Frageräume) arranged around emotional themes—love, anger, desire, fear, etc.—although I understand this is maybe just not for me. (However, a video display of two famous Afri-Cola ads in the “Desire” section failed the basic job of specifying their date and creator.) I am a nerdy tourist, and I like to go to places like Cologne to experience their local curiosities and specificities, not to dwell on universal truths. Overall there were a some moments in the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum I liked (a display on games, a corner dedicated to Cologne’s scandals and petty corruption) overshadowed by a sense that this kind of museum curation is just not to my taste, which tends toward social, political, economic, and environmental history.
However, I did come to one universal truth: museums need to stop relying on Wi-Fi and QR codes.
Here are two UX experiences nobody likes: captive wi-fi portals, and scanning QR codes with your phone. And here’s a UX experience everyone definitely hates: a captive wi-fi portal that doesn’t work. The WLAN never worked for me. Talk about emotionalizing the museum experience! Without wi-fi or LTE I am sure I missed learning a lot about Cologne amidst all of the QR codes I couldn’t scan.
Please, museum designers, QR codes are a crutch, and a digital museum experience needs to be more seamless than this. (Oh, and also don’t make your apps so bloated! Some text and audio should be a few hundred KB per page, maybe a couple MB for the occasional high resolution image, tops.)
😤🤧
Daniel Liu, History of Science 
