How are museums in Australia and Aotearoa conducting visitor research? Read on for our insights on tried and tested methods, such as surveying, to newer strategies like interactive technology.

Recently I headed to Canberra for the Visitor Research Forum at Geoscience Australia. As well as watching earthquake monitoring in action and touching a 3.8-billion-year-old piece of the moon on loan from NASA, it was great to get insight into the ways that museums in Australia and Aotearoa are tackling visitor research.

I was particularly excited to hear from my hometown museum, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington. As a kid, I remember wanting to tick off the same things during every visit to Te Papa: the interactive house that recreated the experience of an earthquake, Golden Days, a short film that brought you into an old junk shop to highlight some key historical moments, Time Warp, a high tech (for the 90s) exhibit where a girl with a cool haircut called Rima took you virtual snowboarding in the future, and of course a visit to the café for a sausage roll and hot choc. These experiences are seared into my brain – and I remember feeling a strong sense of ownership and belonging, especially when bringing someone new to the museum.

The State of Visitor Surveying in Australia and Aotearoa

At the forum, Te Papa spoke about their in-house evaluation framework in 2018 called the 'Audience Impact Model (AIM)'. Created out of a drive to move away from 'vanity metrics' and a recognition that 'numbers are only the beginning', the model evaluates impact from visitor experience, looking at metrics like wonder, awe, emotion, learning, influence and change.

Other presenters talked through their different surveying models which ranged from basic on-site surveys capturing key KPIs for reporting to instruments that contribute to impact evaluation such as DoVE (Dimensions of Visitor Experience), an adjective checklist designed by Jan Packer, Roy Ballantyne and Nigel Bond.

While visitor surveys provide important understanding of who is visiting museums, why they’re visiting and how satisfied they are with their experience, most presenters acknowledged that, on their own, surveys are rarely enough.

Image Credit: James Henry, courtesy of ACMI.

Alternative and complementary methods

The Australian War Memorial spoke about a rigorous iterative design process they are undertaking as part of their $500 million dollar redevelopment. The methodology includes a national survey, as well as focus groups and reference/advisory groups formed from people with lived experience, described as ‘story owners’, offering vital qualitative insights from visitors and stakeholders.

At Patternmakers, we’re conscious of survey fatigue and only use surveying strategically. We’re also committed to the idea of ‘collect once, use often’ – such as with the Audience Outlook Monitor, where each phase of data collection is reported in multiple formats, distributed to over 100 participating organisations and shared publicly online.

For us the answer to less surveying often lies in stronger qualitative research. Often, we’re using focus groups and interviews in an exploratory phase, to help design a framework for surveys. Other times, we’re using focus groups to dive deeper into findings identified in quantitative research.

For example, we offer focus groups to our museum and gallery clients, in addition to on-site exit intercept surveying, to help give colour and deeper insight on certain emerging trends or questions we can’t quite interpret from the survey data alone.

Leveraging interactive technology in museums to gather quantitative data

The main thing my formative museum experiences had in common was an interactive or multi-sensory element (and the promise of a snack). Young people are generally more easily engaged by digital and interactive experiences, and more museums and galleries are leaning into interactive and digital elements in their curation – even something as simple as a QR code on an exhibit label is a starting point.

Image Credit: Courtesy of ACMI.

ACMI’s new Strategic Research Lead, Dr Indigo Holcombe-Jones, spoke to this point at the Forum. With a focus on digital and screen culture, ACMI is in a good position to lead in this area, and one exciting innovation is ACMI’s Lens, a free handheld device which allows visitors to tap and ‘collect’ things they saw during their visit and revisit them online later.

As well as encouraging visitors to engage in multi-sensory ways, the Lens has potential to improve understanding of how people are actually interacting with exhibition content. Even if a visitor doesn’t register their lens online, anonymous data can be captured with every tap. This alone might not give a full picture of visitor behaviour – but paired with other data sources like observations, surveying and actual attendance figures, a more complete picture of visitor experience can be painted.

Equally, interactive digital labels on exhibitions can help track who is clicking what, or even QR codes can provide Google Analytics data on which exhibits make people want to read further.

When Te Papa opened in the late 90s it was an exciting and contemporary reimagining of what many New Zealanders thought museums could be. It wasn't just the sausage rolls that got me through the door again and again, and I think 90s Caitlin would have loved a special card to tap every time she visited Te Papa’s Time Warp, or the ability to log in online and hang out with her virtual buddy Rima. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, elements of her visitor journey could have been tracked over the years, and contributed to Te Papa's understanding of its impact.

Cover Image Credit: Shannon McGrath, courtesy of ACMI.

About the Author

Caitlin McNaughton
Manager, Research and Insights

 
 

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