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.

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.

6. Credit: Dave Patten Credit: Scott Gunn Credit: Scott Gunn

7. Credit: Sarah Sosiak

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

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

14. What are we asking
visitors to do?

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.

16. We assume visitors have the
same understanding as us

18. Credit: Royterp

19. And we assume …
• They understand
history
• And that adults know
more than children

20. Visitors want more information…
and less text
• Why is it here?
• Who made it?
• How did it affect people’s lives?
• How does it work?

21. New types of exhibition

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

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

25. • Image Science Museum/Santiago Arribas-Pena

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)

27. Thank you/Tak