The National Gallery

The National Gallery

The National Gallery is one of the most visited museums in the world and contains over 2300 paintings. The gallery represents all major Western European painting traditions, from late medieval and Italian Renaissance artists to the French Impressionists.

The Goal

The National Gallery wanted to provide visitors with an accessible and contemporary guide while also generating as much income as possible. After using traditional audio-guide hardware, The National Gallery asked Smartify to write, produce, and distribute exhibition guides to visitors' devices.

Smartify’s Solution

The Smartify creative team writes, records, and produces the audio tours for the National Gallery’s temporary exhibition program. Working collaboratively with the curators at the National Gallery, we help explore the exhibitions for contemporary visitors.

Drawing on our team’s technical and design expertise, we connected guides to the online ticketing user journey. Visitors purchasing a ticket could choose to buy an audio guide as well, which would be sent via a link and QR code on the ticket. In addition, visitors could purchase the guide at the ticket desk.

Smartify connected our in-app analytics on visitor engagement directly to the National Gallery’s internal analytics monitoring platform to ensure they had a clear oversight on usage, pinch points, engagement, and demographics of those using the tool.

The Results

Advertised to visitors at the start of their visit, our Smartify audio guide has already become an integral part of the visitor experience. It has higher take-up rates and generates significantly more income for the museum than the previous device-based operation.