Every Step They Take, Every Move They Make
There are so many methods to explore how visitors learn in museums. But I admit that Timing & Tracking holds a special place in my heart.
Not familiar? Timing & Tracking is an unobtrusive observational method – meaning: watch a visitor without them knowing you’re watching. Record where they go, in what order, where they stop, and how long they spend. Every step they take, every move they make.
(I tell myself that’s what the Police were singing about. They weren't.)
Timing & Tracking tells you a lot. People's behavior - and how it interacts with a built environment - is revealing. And as we've timed and tracked visitors, whether the exhibit was about animals, artistic process, natural history, anthropology, cultures, or early childhood play, here are three patterns that we saw happen a lot.
1: Visitors lose steam.
When you look at a bunch of exhibit heat maps – a visualization to show where visitors stop most often – you often see the Great Gallery Cooldown. A phenomenon where visitors pay attention to more stuff early in the exhibit. And as they continue, they stop at fewer and fewer elements.
It is not that all the neat stuff is at the beginning. In fact, there’s often a lot of fascinating stuff waiting at the end. It's not conscious. They just… get tired - mentally or physically. The technical term is “visitor fatigue.”
I remember seeing this in an exhibit that had a perfectly symmetrical layout, and entrances at either endpoint. Regardless of entering on the left or right, I saw the same track based on when they hit each section:
- First Half: Diligently stop at nearly every element.
- Second Half: Stop at only the most eye-catching exhibits.
They start out eager and diligent. But with every additional object and gallery, that gusto wanes. More stuff is skipped. Not because it's not interesting. Just because it was later.
2: The secret power of linearity.
Another thing we've seen many times, in various forms: Exhibits with more structured layouts tend to get visitors who stay longer and see more stuff.
One exhibit was a one-gallery exhibit that was extremely linear – every element was along the walls, in a horseshoe shape. I was fascinated at how diligent groups were. They’d follow the horseshoe path, stopping at the majority of elements at least briefly – and lingering at whatever they found fascinating.
In contrast, a different one-gallery exhibit had an extremely open layout – pods of elements scattered around the floor. Visitors tended to step in and... pause. They would slow-walk the space, looking all around them. It took a while for them to settle on where to look first. Ultimately, we had to slice the data to quantify this “wandering time” because it was such a big part of each visit.
What’s the difference? Decisions.
Offer a “yellow brick road" and visitors happily follow it. They don't spend a bunch of (limited) mental energy making decisions about where to go. Instead, they can spend more thought on what’s in front of them. It's exhibit mindfulness.
When things are extremely open, it puts more decisions on their shoulders. Get oriented, figure out options, choose a path, and choose what to try. It’s cognitive overload before they've read their first label!*
An instructional designer said to me recently, “Decisions are for experts.” People don't make choices at random. (Especially not when we paid $100 to get our family in the door.) Decisions are informed by what they know. And visitors in a brand new exhibit space lack basic information to decide on a pathway without cues.
*OK, there's also some FOMO. That tends to emerge as visitors pinballing to whatever they see others doing.
3: Stuff over Screens
I don’t know if this has always been true, but it's a trend we’ve seen recently in exhibits that blend of digital and physical elements.
What captured visitors’ attention more? The stuff.
The “stuff” depends on the museum – objects, artifacts, works of art, live animals, specimens, documents, whatever. Regardless, the "stuff" could hold attention – especially when it was displayed in ways that allow visitors to look closely and examine whatever makes it special.
Digital interactives, videos, or games? We saw less attention to those screens, relative to objects. They aren’t ignored, of course! (And if you throw in a bench, all bets are off.) But in aggregate, media were not as broadly used as looking at the actual stuff.
Similarly, labels that enable this close looking are big winners in the Signage Derby. If a label answers the question “What am I looking at and why is it special?” without requiring me to move my body from viewing the object – I’d bet money it will be a popular label.
(And you will hear it quoted back to you in exit interviews. But that’s a different method.)
Real World Example:
When we had the chance to study the same exhibit installed in two different museums, we saw differences that can emerge from an open versus enclosed exhibit layout. Both exhibits had walls defining the space. But one used pony walls with a wide open entryway, surrounded by other exhibits. The other contained this exhibit within full walls and more typical doorway entrances.
More visitors in the enclosed space stopped at more of the elements. The overall patterns of what was more or less popular held. But in the enclosed space, more visitors stopped at more things.
Visitors also spent longer in the enclosed space - more than six minutes longer, on average.
Oh, and look closely, and there's a bit of evidence of "cooling" toward elements furthest from the entrances. That was true for both installations.
Now, of course, there are other factors at play here. Every exhibit and institution is a unique and dynamic flower. But common trends tell us something about underlying human behavior. And its always easier to work with visitors’ instincts than to fight them.
What patterns have you seen? Got an example of an exhibit that totally busted these patterns? Hit reply and tell me all about it! We learn as much from the outliers as we do from the average.