Identifying Your Audience Front End

Identifying Your Audience: Front End Evaluation in Exhibit Design
Monica Post October 2010

Introduction
How do you develop your exhibits?-
Are you making assumptions?
Are you making the choice for the visitor?
Are you hearing select anecdotal information and basing everything on that?
Are you asking your visitors what they want?... know… etc?

Are you asking, listening and responding?

What is Front End Evaluation?

Three (or Four) types of Evaluation:

1. Front End Evaluation: At the beginning of design
Find out what audience knows, vocabulary, misconceptions, how they want to learn
2. Formative Evaluation: As the project is being designed, but before it is too far to make
changes. Try out prototypes and activities, make changes and try them again. Find out
how the audience uses and responds to the proposed design, what are the take away
messages, what needs to be changed?
3. Remedial Evaluation: After the exhibit is complete… maybe before audiences come
in, maybe not. Finding what doesn’t work and fixing what you can. May be as simple as
changing a light bulb, tightening a screw or moving a sign. This is not intended for major
changes- those should have been caught in formative. You do remedial so that you aren’t
paying someone to tell you that “no one read that sign because the light was burned out”.

Sometime when an exhibit has been in place for a while and ready for an
overhaul, I might be hired to conduct remedial evaluation. In this case they
know the space isn’t working and they want specifics regarding why because
they will be changing the space and the study will advise the changes. This is a
semantics issue: studying the existing space for the purpose of making changes
could be classified as front end- because it is before the new exhibit is being
designed and the study will advise the design. It can also be considered
formative because it is an exhibit that is being tested and anticipated to see
changes. In this case the old exhibit acts like a prototype.. Or it could be
summative- we are studying a completed exhibit to determine the message
outcomes and how people use the space. No matter what you want to call this
type of remedial evaluation, (it probably should have a totally different name), it
is great that the museum has the foresight and ability to do the testing.

MPR Museum Consulting October 2010
www.MPRconsultants.com Monica Post

4. Summative Evaluation happens after the exhibit is open, visitors are coming in,
burned out light bulbs have been replaced and all the fixes that are going to be made,
have been made. Summative evaluation is not intended to improve the exhibit, it is
intended to measure how well it works. Its like a college final exam. You aren’t going to
improve after taking the exam, that’s not its intent. Summative evaluation measures the
exhibit take away messages. What visitors feel, what they did, how they behaved, what
they are leaving the space with. (You can’t necessarily say… what they learned, unless
you know what they entered the exhibit knowing and then measure what they left
knowing). Cognitive gain can be measured in a summative evaluation, but that has to be
addressed specifically.

Back to Front End
• Front End Evaluation is research conducted at the beginning of the planning process.

• Data gathered during the front end process advises and guides the interpretation
content and delivery.

• While there is still time to make changes, but not so early that you don’t have any
information or details that you can give to participants.

The earlier the better……. sort of. Better late than never.

Step 1 What do you want to know / or need to find out?
• What your visitors already know
vocabulary
misconceptions

• Attitudes and Emotions

• What your visitors want to know
how much do they want to know?

• How do they want to learn it?
do it?
read it?
watch it?
listen to it?

• What do you already know about your audience?
demographics


vocabulary

Step 2 How are you going to find out?
Lots of methods to choose from
Literature review
Surveys
Interviews
Post it surveys
Observation of existing spaces
Focus groups
Concept Mapping

Key point: Usually you will need to use more than one method

Step 3 How to Design your study
what works for who?
general visitors- interviews, surveys, post it surveys
target audiences- focus groups
school groups
new audiences
your visitors
your members
your board

Step 4 How to Write a Front End Interview
Start with a Topic or even better: The Big Idea
Anticipated vocabulary
Misconceptions?
Level of Interest
Type of delivery methods

Types of Questions
open, closed, scale, ranking
Length of Interview
Demographics- ! Remember the purpose ! The demographics are here to
make sure your sample is representative of your
audience. Not to determine who your audience is.


Only ask questions that you will act on.
Respect and recognize participants’ time – so keep it short
Think about your audience - No wrong answers
Leading questions- have a place- probably not in front end evaluation

Step 5 How to Conduct the Interview

Procedure for collecting data (Front End Interview)
Equipment: Clipboard or notebook, pens or pencils, a small notepad
1. Determine an imaginary line where you are recruiting people. (We have done this
already as a group). Pick every fifth person who crosses that imaginary line to approach
about participating in this interview- or the next person after you’ve finished with the
first.
Random selection criteria:
The accuracy of the data is dependant on getting a realistic sample of the audience
in this space. For this reason, it is very important to follow the criteria list below.
You will be approaching every fifth person. If, while you are talking with a
participant, more than five people slip by, that is O.K. – approach the next person.
Do not avoid approaching someone because they “look like” they might not want
to: or any other reason. If you avoid approaching someone because they look
like they might be in a hurry, or you think that he/she wouldn’t want to
participate, then you are introducing your bias into the data. That will skew the
data and change the outcome. Approach everyone that fits the criteria- every fifth
person over age 8.
You should not interview anyone who looks as though they are not old enough to
read – around 8 years old. In other words- if your fifth person is a toddler –go to
the next person. If your fifth person looks to be around ten years old- approach
that person.
If the person is a child – approach them cautiously speaking loud enough for the
accompanying adult to hear and ask the adult if it is o.k. for the child to
participate in the interview.- You will have to use your judgement and ability to
work with children and their parents here. Do not avoid asking children just
because it is a pain or you are uncomfortable – that would bias the data.
Do not recruit more than one person in a group- (even if there are more than 11),
you will get a bias. Do not give away a gift to anyone who has not completed an
interview.

2. Use this recruiting statement:


Hello, Excuse me. We are working on a new exhibit and would like to get some feedback
from our visitors. Would you be willing to answer a few questions that will help us
develop a new exhibit? It should take less than 5 minutes.
Do not pause before completing the final sentence.
3. If the visitor says “yes”
Begin asking the questions as they are written.

Write down the visitor responses using their words as best as possible.

Do not instruct, correct or influence them before the interview.

Do not help them with the interview. For example if they say “I want to learn about that
machine that … you know, picks corn- what’s that thing called?” Be very slow to
respond. Like you have amnesia also. Then if that doesn’t work, respond with an
answer like “Oh, that slips my mind also- I’ll write it down as you’ve described it.

4. If the visitor asks a question or wants to discuss something, politely say something
like: ‘Let’s go ahead and finish this and then I’ll be happy to tell you more about that.”

Step 6 How to Analyze the Data
Don’t start analysis until you have all the data for one method of study
Give each instrument a number
Enter data into the computer
If using a word processing program: don’t auto number
When all the data is entered, this is your rough compilation.

Now you need to go over each answer and find commonalities.
For example: For question #1 you notice that 4 people used the “creepy”

(Please forgive the indentation: I can’t get my computer to get rid of it suddenly.)

Create a “Creepy” subheading and put the 4 people who used that word and
put their complete answer under that subheading

Participant number 12 may have used the word “creepy” and “cute” in their
answer. They will be represented under both sub
categories.

When the data for each question has been compiled this is your final
compilation. You will use this to analyze your data.

So for your analysis you may note that 27% of the visitors used the word
“creepy” in their answer to question 1. This is
information that the designer can use to develop their


layout and messages. Does “creepy” need to be
addressed? …. probably how? It depends on the
purpose of the exhibit…. Do you want the exhibit to feel
creepy…or safe?


Identifying Your Audience Front End

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