Patterns in Visitor Research
To summarize this page, I've drawn out some interesting points which could be lost in the research on this page. These points have been seen multiple times.
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Approachability of Museum Staff:
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Visitors feel that museum staff does not care much about them, and are not approachable for help and advice. [3] This is especially true for people with disabilities. [6]
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Interactive Exhibits:
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Museum visitors love to be engaged and love interactive exhibits. It is important to engage all the members of the family, even at children's museum where engaging parents is overlooked. Engaging visitors is not so straight forward though; If it requires reading direction, they are notorious for failing to do so, choosing instead to copy the person in front of them. [2]
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Desired Experience:
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Visitors work all day and don't wish to take on a greater cognitive load. [5] They desire "a multifaceted experience involving both physical relaxation and intellectual exploration." [1] Stimulating emotions, and thought, are also important. [3][5] What emerges is a need for personal identification with the stories and with the methods adopted in terms of narrative and interaction. [5]
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Museum Prestige:
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Visitors see museums as very prestigious and believe the content of the museum is very trustworthy. This is great, but it also means that visitors will find it difficult to questions and challenge the museum, and soliciting this kind of feedback and interacting is generally challenging. This is especially true for students and younger museum visitors. [3][4]
[1] The Information-Seeking Behavior of Museum Visitors
[2] Examples of Common Mistakes in Museum Design
[3] Educator and Student Museum Visitors
[4] Science Museum Visitors
[5] Non-Visitors: Teenagers
[6] Accessibility to visitors
The Information-Seeking Behavior of Museum Visitors
Original document available at: home.earthlink.net/~toriorr/ROL_MuseumVisitors.doc
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(all sources of information are referenced at the end of the original document).
Examples of Common Mistakes in Museum Design
http://www.ukupa.org.uk/events/presentations/science_museum.pdf
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- Visitors will not read instructions on how to operate the exhibit. Nearly always, they will copy the actions of the visitors before them.
- Visitors like orientation (not necessarily organization!). Chaos and randomness often do not work. For example, one museum filled its lobby with a sampling of artifacts from each of its exhibits, but unfortunately these were ignored)
- Delivering the context and theme of the museum exhibit can be difficult. Visitors can often jump to conclusions. For example, one exhibit on the timeline of landmark inventions included a giant aircraft in the center. Upon entering the hall, visitors assumed they were visiting an exhibit on transportation.
Educator and Student Museum Visitors
This document details the results of several focus groups conducted by the V&A museum (http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/architecture/index.html) in London, England. The chosen users are the teachers and students of key stage 2 & 3 (ages 9-14), and the professors and students of further education and higher education (ages 15+ ). The exhibit which they are researching is on architecture, but many generalizations to other contexts are safe to make from the results.
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- Younger students need to be wowed, inspired and need practical hands-on activities. To enhance the visit of young students, museum must have strong pre and post visit experience.
- "Readiness to learn is enhanced by perceived relevance of the subject. Long term learning is confirmed by subsequent experience."
Science Museum Visitors
The website has several posts which hash the information gathered from a massive survey with 14,000 respondants, from fifty museums and science centers. If you check the website, be sure to click the science museum visitor tag in order to see only the posts they've made on the data from the result of the survey.
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We also found something else that startled us. When we asked the entire sample of respondents what types of museums they enjoyed visiting, and then ranked the museums by their results, this is what we found:
1. Zoos and Aquariums
2. Natural History
3. Historic Sites
4. Nature Centers
5. Art Museums
6. Botanical Gardens (tied)
7. Science/Technology Centers
8. Children's Museums (but #2 for parents)
9. History Museums
Non-Visitors: Teenagers
This article involves the results from a survey from the Fitzcarraldo Fondazione in Italy on teenage non-visitors. It involved focus groups of five higher-education institutes in Modena, with about 90 young people between the ages of 14 and 19. The article states that the results from the teenagers can be applied to adults non-visitors as well.
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Teenagers study all day, and view museums as additional workload. Museums must compete with things such as movies, which are much more accessible and therefore more instantly gratifying. Museum must deliver intense emotions during a visit (the emotional dimension appears to dominate the cognitive sphere in determining the value of the experience) so what emerges is a need for personal identification with the stories and with the methods adopted in terms of narrative and interaction.
Accessibility to visitors
1. People with disabilities visit museums: an exploratory study of obstacles and difficulties
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