I don’t know exactly where it was, and I can’t really vouch for its scientific rigour, but I once read in a book about museum design that people go through three stages whilst visiting a museum.
0 - 30 Minutes: Intense Study
30 - 60 Minutes: General Browse
60 Minutes Plus: Exit Bound
The idea here is relatively simple. For the first half an hour or so the average visitors will intensely scrutinise every case and artefact. Reading every label and display board and pondering their meaning. After this as the mind starts to wander and information overload sets in they’ll take a leisurely stroll around the exhibits looking at the occasional item and reading some of the main displays. Then after about an hour they start gunning for the exit, but taking a circuitous route to make sure they’ve ‘seen’ everything.
Man walking through a gallery, presumably very fast because he’s blurred (Image from Anna Stills)
As I mentioned I haven't seen the studies for myself that back this theory up, and there are of course a multitude of factors from the museum design to the individual visitors which vary these numbers significantly. However, the general gist passes the smell test and knowing about it I have noticed the experience within myself.
A Three Phase Museum
With this basic framework in mind it would make sense then for us to attempt to try and take advantage of a person’s attention at any given stage. To this I have in mind what I'm terming the first of my 'Big Ideas' the three different phases to a museum visit that can be used.
Phase 1: Intense Study
Any museum should start with a bird’s eye view of the whole of the topic. For a historical museum this could be a general timeline of the covered events. For a specialist museum a general primer to the topic. Or for something like a science discovery centre it could instead be some key ideas.
The main thing is that at the start this is where you have the most amount of attention and interest so you need to take advantage of that. Tell the entire story of the museum in miniature. Ideally the person could just visit this one opening component (probably put together something like an exhibition) and then leave knowing the general gist.
This is a great place to put many of the more interesting, but less visually appealing objects that really help to tell a story but would struggle to grab attention on their own. It is also where you can get away with the information being at its most dense, though this should still be kept to a reasonable level.
Phase 2: General Browse
After a while the visitor will stop reading everything and start looking for things of particular interest. This then is when you can implement the main body of the collection.
When wandering around they are looking for things to grab their attention and there are two main ways to do this. Firstly either by having something that is particularly eye-catching, perhaps an activity space, a particularly flashy artefact, or something else that otherwise stands out. Secondly, and more importantly in my opinion is for something that links to what they already know. It shouldn’t just be a whole bunch of stuff in cases.
Image of the Pitt Rivers Museum Main Hall which typifies a room full of ‘Stuff’ (Image from Geni)
Here the key idea is to have the collection of exhibits, artefacts, stations, hand-on tables, whatever expanding on the ideas and story that was set up in the initial phase. They are interested in this particular painting because they already know the important battle it depicts and why it was an important victory. Or they’re drawn to the weird mechanical device because they know that it helped spark the industrial revolution or whatever.
Here it is possible to make people interested in objects they would normally pass straight over by having set them up to already have a vague understanding and notion of it’s importance and you are compounding on that knowledge.
Phase 2 in my ideal should be made of a range of self contained little stories which expound on the overarching idea from Phase 1. And sure, not every person will engage with every bit of it but the idea is that people will pick and choose the bits that interest them the most.
Phase 3: Exit Bound
Finally, when people are generally done with the museum but continue through out of politeness, completionism, or just wanting to maximise ticket value this is where you have to hit them with some biggies to squeeze out the last bit of interest.
First impressions might be vital but it’s the last impressions that people walk away with so I think it’s important to have people go out on a high note, but this can be difficult when this is where people are least engaged.
The simplest way to do this is to physically have the last space be something a bit different and a big heavy hitter. Perhaps something more experiential like an immersive space that recaps the museum as a whole. Something fun and practical that breaks up the experience with something of a ‘change is as good as a rest’ mentality would also work here. Think like grabbing people's attention in Phase 2 but turned up to 11.
For a more traditional and easier way of going about this however is this is where you can crack out your heavy hitter artefacts. This is the perfect place to put your Hero Item[s] (The hero item being the most interesting or famous object, and typically the one highlighted in marketing), everyone is going to leave happy if the last thing they see is the Mona Lisa
A very crowded Mona Lisa Gallery (Image from Context Travel)
An Unrevolutionary Idea
These phases of mine are not revolutionary. Many of the better and well thought out museums already adhere to some kind of variation on this principle but it would not surprise you how many utterly fail to come close.
The difficulty here then is that you perhaps start a museum by being pushed too quickly out into rooms of interesting items but with little context. Here you can waste the initial burst studying some perfectly fine but not overly stimulating objects. Then the wandering phase can quickly become dull as you wander down yet another row of cases that has more stuff in it. This then transitions more quickly into phase 3 as enthusiasm ebbs and you start to wonder where you’re going to go for lunch.
As I said, this is not a brand new idea, but I would like to see it formalised and practiced some more. I know that there is significant academic study on museum visitor experience, but I have struggled to find anything that leans into this idea of a holistic visit as it typically looks at more moment to moment interactions. (Once again if anyone is looking to fund some research I'm all ears). And I admit that it is entirely possible that this is already the Dr Soandso Museum method, but if it is I’m yet to find it.
We also need to consider the practicalities of such a setup. This is an idea that really only fits mid-sized museums. A museum that is small enough to only take 30-45 minutes or perhaps less doesn’t need to consider this in quite the same way. And a national scale museum that could take many many hours and will realistically only have visitors selecting parts of the museum for serious consideration will need to work differently (though perhaps each part can use this idea on a smaller scale).
It also relies somewhat on a largely linear physical space, which is not always possible. There is an implied starting, and ending point that isn’t always present and careful consideration of how the collection might be able to fit such a structure. A more general and wide ranging museum might not be able to so neatly find key ideas that can cover the whole thing.
Still, I think that the phases are both highly intuitive and also reasonably practical to consider and work with to a greater or lesser extent. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to work them into something a bit more evidence based and directly applicable but I’m still confident that it remains immediately useful.
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