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First Time vs. Repeat Visitors
Museums need visitors to be sustainable. The challenge is that museums are competing with a myriad of other activities potential visitors can do in their limited leisure time (Heuken et al., 2021: 167). To build audiences, museums can reach out to new, first time visitors and/or encourage repeat visitors. Ideally a bit of both. What…
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10 Things I Only Learned about Visitor Studies Once I Started Doing Them
Before conducting my first few visitor studies, I prepared thoroughly by studying the best practices, reading articles and trying out different evaluation techniques in school settings. All this preparation was essential and valuable, but I couldn’t learn certain lessons until I got out there on my own! Here are 10 things I have learned about…
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5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the History of Visitor Studies
Image Above: Gilman (1916) This post highlights some key points of visitor studies history, from Bernard Schiele’s 2016 article titled “Visitor studies: A short history.” The first studies emerged in the early 20th century (Schiele, 2016). One of the early writers is Benjamin Ives Gilman, whose study highlighting museum fatigue (1916) is still referenced today…
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Plan to be Surprised
Visitor studies can be full of surprises. From the study’s development to analysing results, you are bound to find questions, patterns and responses you did not anticipate – and that is a good thing. The reason visitor studies have this potential for surprise is because they are about individuals. There is no visitor experience without…
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How do I Pick the Right Methods for my Visitor Study?
There are so many ways to approach doing a visitor study and choosing the right method – or methods – can feel daunting. All visitor studies should have a research question, to focus the study. But, you can’t go up to visitors and ask them your research question directly. Well, technically you can, but it…
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