Culture Meets Technology: Evaluating the Multi-Channel Museum Experience
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Museums are embracing mobile technology. From online collections to in-gallery interactives to social tour apps, the museum world is exploding with new ideas for engaging with visitors across time and space. In light of this changing landscape, new research methods are needed to understand, evaluate and enhance the multi-channel museum experience. In this case study presented at the Market Research in a Mobile World conference (MRMW), Kathi Kaiser and Tanya Treptow describe how an internationally-renown Chicago museum partnered with a user experience firm to explore methods for evaluating museum apps from the visitor’s perspective.
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Culture Meets Technology: Evaluating the Multi-Channel Museum Experience
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Editor's Notes
- Welcome! Today we’ll be sharing a case study about the unique challenges of evaluating the visitor experience when traditional museums bring cutting-edge technology into the galleries. We’ll discuss the critical role that a great user experience plays in helping museums leverage data from the use of mobile technology to better understand and serve their target audiences.
- We’re from Centralis, a UX research and design firm based here in Chicago. We help our clients succeed by making their digital products easier and more rewarding to use. This involves spending a lot of time with users – observing them in the real world, designing prototypes to address their needs and testing the usability and appeal of interfaces in our lab.
- Lately, we have become interested in the experiences of people when they go to museums, and how new technologies are changing those experiences. Traditionally, people tend to think of museums as formal places. Stately architecture, organized exhibitions and hushed galleries contribute to this formality. Even in more interactive institutions like science museums, the overall model is one of outward communication – the curators, through the objects they select and arrange – seek to convey knowledge. Visitors observe these objects and take away some or all of the messages intended by the curators.
- Mobile technology is changing the game for museums. Thanks to the smartphones in their pockets, visitors can now play a more active role in creating their own experiences in museums. One of the leading museums to explore these possibilities is the Cleveland Museum of Art, via their Art Lens app and Gallery One interactives.
- Another example of mobile technology in museums is the interactive ‘Great Map’ at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK.
- The Dallas Museum of Art’s ‘Friends’ program combines a gamified experience for visitors with data collection for the museum.
- The success of these and future interactive experiences like them depends on research – understanding how people use them and what they do and do not find compelling about them. Currently, most museums do a pretty good job at understanding visitors before they visit – they know why different types of people come to museums. They also have a sound set of methods for evaluating visitor experiences after the fact.
- The gap is understanding what happens during the visit itself. How do visitors interact with the technology that museums provide? What assumptions do users bring about how the technology will work? Do visitors discover all of the features and capabilities provided? Do they have fun using it? Does it enhance their experience at the museum, or detract from it? To answer these questions, the missing method is in-gallery usability testing.
- Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History recently launched its ‘Mobile Tours App’ that provides interactive content and tours of its collections and special exhibitions.
- To evaluate the app, we conducted one-on-one facilitated sessions with pre-recruited participants. Tasks included following tours, creating tours and scanning objects – along with free exploration and user-driven tasks.
- To record the sessions, we mounted a camera on a sled to point down at the phone screen, and also used a mobile microphone and HD camera to capture participants’ comments as they moved throughout the museum.
- We learned a great deal about how the current design of the app enhanced or detracted from the visitor’s experience in the museum. Broadly speaking, the study revealed three key findings. First, engagement comes from enhancing visitors’ approach to the museum, not changing it. Visitors’ greatest enjoyment came from wandering and discovering spontaneously, not creating tours or following them.
- Second, maps and wayfinding played a critical role in visitors’ interest in using the app. Users have high expectations for maps – they expect them to be detailed, specific and interactive. When visitors struggled to locate the exhibits they sought, their perception of the app and their overall experience suffered.
- For all our participants, encountering a usability issue meant abandoning the app altogether. Visitors’ primary goal in the museum is to have fun, whether that’s through exploring interesting objects, learning something new, or sharing the experience with others. Usability issues are not fun – they are frustrating and can make people feel foolish or dumb. When using the app stopped being fun, visitors put it away, and did not take it out again.
- The methods we used to study engagement at the Field Museum can be used to explore the intersection of the digital & physical worlds across a number of contexts, including transportation, shopping…
- The methods we used to study engagement at the Field Museum can be used to explore the intersection of the digital & physical worlds across a number of contexts, including transportation, shopping…
- In the end, usability testing helps remove barriers to joy – which is the experience that museums want to create, and visitors want to have.