Museums studying the customer experience

Mar 12, 2008

As museums expand, they need more paying customers to cover ever-increasing costs. And they’re competing for those customers with local shopping malls, movie theaters, even grocery stores. ...

Now, besides the reliable techniques - focus groups, exit surveys and mail-in questionnaires - museums are exploring new ways to learn what visitors want. In Detroit, which is spending $158 million on a renovation and gallery reinstallation project to be finished this fall, researchers visited local mothers in their homes to determine how to attract more families to the museum.

A major question is how to use this data: should it impact just functional elements of the experience, like opening hours and traffic flow? Or should it reach into editorial decisions, like which exhibitions to run? If the museum wants to bring in the crowds, for example, it can run an exhibit on Monet or motorcycles.

In other words, focusing on the customer requires two things:

• listening well (i.e., using an appropriate research method)

• and using that knowledge in the right way.

For a museum, "the customer is always right" in functional areas - it doesn't matter how meaningful the art is if visitors can't find it - but the aesthetics of the experience shouldn't necessarily be left up to the crowds. So the customer isn't necessarily always right, depending on the context.

A related article states the difficulties faced by several museums after hiring "starchitects" for a glitzy, possibly overblown redesign:

The one million visitors expected the first year after the Denver Art Museum’s $110 million expansion by Daniel Libeskind amounted to only 650,000, feeding talk about over-building. ... Among [the director's] many irksome duties: laying off 14 percent of the staff (there had been a 29 percent increase to handle the doubling of space) and fielding criticisms about Mr. Libeskind’s vertigo-inducing design.

The "good experience" way to respond to customers is to meet their key unmet needs while still remaining faithful to the long-term vision of the organization. In my experience, ego-driven starchitecture is usually indifferent or even hostile to the users of a space. One exception in the museum world is the new MoMA space, which brings the visitors easily to the art, while still maintaining an elegant, modernist aesthetic.

More generally, though, anyone who creates an experience - a designer, product manager, user experience practitioner, etc. - can learn from the museum world. Choosing the right research method is one task; deciding what to do with the feedback is quite another.

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See also: Three strands of good experience

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