This document discusses how museums can better understand and meet visitor needs and expectations. It summarizes that visitor motivations for visiting museums are diverse, including seeing it as a family outing, fulfilling an interest or hobby, or seeking an educational experience. Research shows visitors spend less time than museums assume exploring exhibits and don't always understand themes or start at the beginning. New types of interpretation using technology and interactive elements can help deepen engagement. Understanding visitor backgrounds, behaviors, and what museums are asking of them can help create exhibitions that better serve diverse audiences.
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4 Alex Burch denmark 2014
1. We Are Not Visitors
Alex Burch
Director of Learning
Science Museum Group
2. Role of Audience Research
• Happens before, during and
after development
• Identifies gaps between
visitors’ needs, wants and
expectations – and those of
the Museum
• Work with teams to
implement
interpretation/learning
strategies
3. Different motivations for visiting
Sharon MacDonald
• A day out
– a leisure activity, spending time with the family
• Life-cycle
– a visit was something you did at a particular life-
stage.
• Place
– one of the ‘things to do in London’, a destination
• Education
– to learn something new
4. John Falk
• Explorers
– Curiosity driven, with generic interest in the museum’s content
• Facilitators
– Socially motivated, visit primarily focussed on enabling the
experience and learning of others
• Professionals/Hobbyists
– Motivated by a desire to sarisfy a specific content-related
objective.
• Experience seekers
– Motivated to visit because perceive museum as important
destination
• Rechargers
– seeking contemplative or restorative experience.
5. Why Important?
As Falk states:
‘…visitors’ entering motivations appear to
have a particularly strong and important
influence on both in-museum experiences
and learning’
In Understanding Museum Visitors’ Motivations and Learning. Museums Social Learning Spaces and Knowledge
Producing Processes.
8. Why Important?
Visitors have a script
That script is about the place
This profoundly influences expectations,
behaviours and visitors’ approaches to
content
9. We assume they spend
a long time
Who Am I?
• 14 object cases
• 50 interactives
• 1000 sq m floor area
• Av. dwell time: 21mins.
• Max. time: 103mins
10. Beverly Serrell
The study:
• 8,507 visitors,
• 110 exhibitions
• 62 museums
Longest dwell time
• 128 mins,
• 1% ≥ 1 hour.
• ≤ 20mins most common
• On average, visitors at
only 1/3 of the exhibition
elements.
11. We also assume…
• That visitors start at the beginning
• That they know the title of the exhibition
• That what is iconic to us is to them
• That they understand the themes of an
exhibition
• They read the text
12.
13. How visitor background and
behaviour impact
Mechanical Brides
• ½ the audience
understood the curatorial
themes
Influencing factors:
• Gender & college
education
• Intentional visitors
• Encountered adverts
Image courtesy of
www.historyworld.co.uk
15. Value/cost model
• Steve Bitgood – ‘attention-value’ model
• Capturing attention is influenced by a number of
variables including the size, isolation and location of
exhibit elements.
• Perceptual distractions are the most serious threats to
sustained attention to exhibition elements.
• Higher value objects receive the most attention.
– As the number of objects in the visitor’s visual field
increases, visitors will become more selective in that
they will attend to a decreasing proportion available.
22. New forms of interpretation
V&A British Galleries
Concerns:
• Distracting, intrusive, anachronistic, patronising
Research showed :
• Deepened engagement with the object providing
context, animation, insight and information
• Equal no. of adult and child users
23.
24. New Platforms
• At Science Museum:
• 80% smartphone
• 50% tablet
• 6% another internet
enabled device
• 2/3 are using this
technology in the
Museum
Not using
• to download our apps
• access more content
Are using:
• Practically
• creatively
• socially
26. • Participants value viewing familiar objects
in new ways
• Value seeing human behaviour from an
outside perspective
“[The costume] made me think more about
life; see myself in the third person.” (adult)
BeverlySerrell. Visitors and Museum Exhibitions. American Association of Museums. Professional Practice Series. 1998110 exhibitions in 62 different museums, combined total of 8,507 visitorsOut of these 8000 tracking, the longest anyone spent in an exhibition was 128 minutes (2hrs 8)Less than 1% spent an hour or moreSerrell concluded that visitors don’t spend long in exhibitions, 20mins or less is a common duration for a single exhibition – regardless of the size or topic of an exhibition visitors seem unwilling to devote hours of attention fantatsized by some exhibition planners. We need to have more realistic expectations for visitors’ timeTypically an exhibition is explored partially not fully. With visitors stopping on average at one third of the exhibition elements]These findings have serious implications for communicating with our visitors – what does this mean for thematic and large exhibitions.There was a correlation between number of stops and amount of time in an exhibition. This means that few visitors spent a long time at a small number of elements.
That they know where to start, But often they unconsciously step into our spacesMissing important information – the exhibition title, introductory textIn the Manchester Science Exhibition in MoSI – MHM evaluation revealed that only 28% of visitors used the orientation panelsMMW – we introduced a large yellow table that outlined how we organised the gallery – only Time measurement only ½ read the text.
In spaces where we have corridors then they will follow this route