Jamtli – three museums in one place and one app

At Jamtli in Östersund, the main town of the province of Jämtland in central Sweden, visitors can experience three museums in one place. History, art and historic settings come together to create unique and exciting experiences that both entertain and move. The ever-growing visitor app has audio guides, a map and guided tours on different themes.

Challenge

Jamtli's three museums are the County Museum, where the history of Jämtland and neighbouring Härjedalen is presented in a large underground landscape; the open-air museum with historic farms and settings; and Nationalmuseum Jamtli, with exhibitions from the collections of Nationalmuseum, Sweden's national museum of art and design.

This breadth makes Jamtli one of the most visited attractions in the region. There really is something for everyone – and a lot for visitors to keep track of. Jamtli previously had an app for audio guides only, and wanted a digital solution that could hold both existing and new audio guides, together with a good map of the open-air museum and the option of adding new themed guides with sound and film over time.

Jamtli's audio guides consist of several hundred audio tracks in three languages. The display cases in the exhibitions are numbered, so it was important to Jamtli that the new app could also search by number.

Solution

An app with the core guide features was a perfect fit for Jamtli's outdoor guides to the open-air museum and a new trail in the County Museum's permanent exhibition indoors. The home screen got a menu (categories) with options for the museum and the open-air museum.

An extra menu at the bottom of the screen lets users quickly go to the overview map, change language or return to the home screen.

To meet Jamtli's wish to search audio tracks by number, we developed a new module called NumPad. It is reached from the app's bottom menu, and visitors simply enter the number shown on the display case they want to know more about.

Jamtli's wishes also led to another new feature: more kinds of subcategories. An overall theme can now be presented with image and text, and users then choose between several tracks within the same theme.

For Christmas 2022, Jamtli added augmented reality to the app and created an ambitious and entertaining Christmas trail where Father Christmas popped up in different places and needed the children's help to solve Christmas-related problems.