Field Study: Benchmarking Visitor Behaviors and Mobile Device Usage in the Museum

Wow, it certainly seems texting with a museum has quickly become all the rage! We couldn’t agree more. As we begin the experience design and active prototyping phases to our museum chatbot project, we will rely on user input as much as possible. After all, even though we’re developing a bot, we’re really designing for humans who will be interacting with the bot. That’s why we’ve spent the last few weeks performing visitor field studies in three of our four museums: Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Science Center.

In order to have reliable data, we wanted to gather input from a representative sample of museum visitors. We entered into the study with a goal of conducting 250–300 interviews and ended up with data from 324 visitors, equally distributed across the three partner museums. (Kudos to Regina McDonald Russian, who did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting!)

The insights we gain from talking openly with potential users will fundamentally inform every aspect of the experience, from the features we deliver first and the subsequent product roadmap to the bot’s personality and voice. This ensures we will build something that connects with users, aligns with their existing behaviors and exceeds their expectations.

The Methodology & Data

Before I get into some of the key takeaways from our field study, just a quick note about our methodology and data. We’ve committed to make this entire process open and transparent, and that commitment extends to our research methodology and collected data. Our interview questions, collection methodology, PDF summary with charts and graphs, and raw data are open sourced over on Github.

Feel free to take and use as you see fit. If you want to hear from your museum’s visitors about some of these topics, go ahead and replicate our survey. If you’re doing academic research into visitor behavior with respect to mobile photography in the gallery, grab our data and integrate it with yours (Looking at you W. Ryan Dodge and Alli Burness). If you end up doing any of this, let us know so we can learn from you!

Key Takeaways: Museum Use

Anytime we do this kind of user research, we’re always surprised by some of the insights we receive. This field study was no different. We segmented our interviews into three sections, defined by our focus areas of inquiry: baseline demographics, museum usage and mobile device usage. Let’s start with some key takeaways from our questions around museum usage.

What brought you into the museum today?

We have a fairly good understanding of who people bring to our museums. The research around the social aspects of museum visits are well documented. However, we don’t know much about what brings people into our museums. We tend to believe that exhibitions or the collection are the alluring elements that pull people into our buildings, but our field study tells us otherwise.

The overwhelming majority of respondents credit leisure activity — or “just something to do” — as their inspiration to visit. This was very surprising to us, as we were fully prepared to hear things like “impressionism” or “dinosaurs” or “Poison” (the current temporary exhibition at Carnegie Museums of Natural History).

While visiting the museum, did you have any questions about exhibitions, individual objects or the facility itself?

When we probed visitors about questions they had during their visit, we found that just about half of the people we spoke with had questions about the facility itself. This mainly related to things like where the bathrooms are, dining options and logistical things like parking or accessibility.

I should note here, that when we segment the data down to reflect responses from the art museum, the percentage of questions relating to individual artworks does rise substantially, to about 28%.

How did you find answers to those questions?

First, the good news. Let’s hear it for our Visitor Services and Gallery Ambassador staff! Most people go directly to a human for answers. This is a reflection of the knowledge and presence of floor staff.

Now the bad news, there is still a large percentage of people who had questions, but didn’t get answers. How can we make sure these visitors’ needs are being met? Could this project help provide people with the information they need while visiting? We think so.

Key Takeaways: Mobile Device Use

Now onto the really interesting stuff. The key to this project will be tightly connecting the way people use the museum with how they use their mobile phone. If we can do that in a compelling and fun way, we’ll have built something of value for our visitors. We were blown away by some of the feedback we received around mobile device usage.

Did you bring a mobile device with you today?

We found that just about 93% of visitors bring a mobile device with them when they visit. We knew this number would be high, and actually though it would be higher. I mean, who are these 7% of people who leave their phones at home or in the car? When we dig into the demographics a bit, we realized it would be unfair to say it’s only the 55-and-over crowd. While they make up the majority of the no-phone visitors, the data shows that there are also Gen-X and Millennial visitors who cruise the galleries sans-phone.

Do you have any museum apps on your phone?

Surprise! People don’t have museum apps on their phone. We kind of knew this going in based on some recent research, but seeing it represented like this — a big red circle with 98% of respondents saying No — is striking. Of the six people we talked to who had a museum app installed on their phone, three had our CMOA/CMNH Gallery Guide app, two people had The Met’s app, and one person had AMNH’s Explorer app.

Did you send any text messages while at the museum today?

We know most people are comfortable sending text messages. Texting culture has permeated and solidified itself within contemporary culture. Our study shows that 95% of respondents regularly send text messages. To go even further, 264 of the 306 people who send text messages classify themselves as heavy texters, or people who send texts “all the time.”

When we asked if people sent any text messages while visiting the museum, the responses evened out to be about 50%-50%. We then pushed a bit further because we wanted to find out a bit more about our visitors’ texting behavior.

If yes, approximately how many text messages did you send while at the museum?

The majority of visitors are keeping their texting in check, but if we think about it another way, 35% reported sending more than 5 texts while visiting, indicating behavior that has been cemented.

We also asked about with whom people were texting. Almost everyone messaged with people elsewhere, not in the museum.

Do you have Facebook Messenger installed on your phone?

While we are planning to prototype via SMS, we are also curious about some other more bot-friendly platforms. Facebook messenger is the most mature at this stage and offers dynamic interaction elements such as buttons, polls and in-line media. Imagine our surprise when we learned that 93% of those polled had Messenger installed on their device. This is something we’ll be considering as we work on a development roadmap moving forward.

Did you take any photos while at the museum today?

Nearly 3/4 of respondents told us they took photos while visiting. This level of visitor photography was not surprising to us. Like text messaging, mobile photography has become a cultural norm.

If yes, what did you photograph?

What did surprise us, however, was the 92% of visitors who told us they photographed the people they were with. Going into this, I would have bet the farm on museum objects sitting atop the list. But alas, people photograph people.

The low percentage of selfies initially took us aback, but after engaging on Twitter with some people who study this kind of thing, our data correlates with other studies.

Next Up: Active Prototyping

After all this insight gathering, I think we have a solid baseline of information to go into active prototyping. The next few weeks will be spent doing controlled prototypes that will help us design experiential elements such as v1 features, voice/tone and engagement metrics. And with active prototyping comes our first code release for the project! Stay tuned!

Research, design, development and open-sourcing of the Studio’s chatbot project is supported by the Knight Foundation.