One of the new pieces of work that has been underway at ACMI recently has been a piece of visitor journey mapping — a tool commonly used in service design.
Like most museums, ACMI has over the years, developed specific workplace practices to overcome or workaround the limitations of architecture, and perhaps the most useful thing about creating a visitor journey map is the teasing out and making legible some of these practices. And, like many other institutions, what a map does is bring together and present a shared knowledge across the various teams involved in delivering the experiences that the visitor has. What might be common knowledge to the front-of-house staff may not be so well understood by others, or not with all its cascading effects.
For example, perhaps a lack of easy to access storage near catering areas may amplify the impact of corporate events on education briefings for school kids attending at the same time. Or maybe a workaround that was made to make online ticketing available in time for a certain exhibition or event, may have incurred a significant technical debt that now makes it much harder to implement other website upgrades.
In order to produce the visitor journey map and report, Kimberley Crofts, Jack Huston and Steve Baty from Meld Studios spent two weeks visiting ACMI as an exhibition goer, a cinema goer, a cafe vistor; observed and interviewed visitors, asking them about how they felt, what they were looking for, what they were attempting to do; and did the same for staff, observing and interviewing them, attempting to understand how they tried to meet the needs of visitors.
The map has three main vertical divisions;
- front stage where all the visitor interactions are documented
- back stage where the staff behaviours are covered
- systems/artefacts which details the underlying infrastructure such as ICT and building systems that constrain or enable both front and back stage.
Horizontally it is divided into the various stages of the visit;
- Awareness: how do visitors become aware of ACMI and make the decision to visit today or tomorrow? The awareness phase speaks to brand presence, as well as the urgency felt around visiting.
- Planning: how do visitors plan their visit (after they’ve made that initial decision to visit)? It is here that we learn a lot about search, web and mobile behaviours, and can begin to understand the impacts of how families make decsions about leisure or cultural activities, as well as the impact of a limited ‘time budget’.
- Wayfinding: how do visitors discover the building and its entrances? ACMI is an interesting building in that is is very centrally located in Melbourne and has at least two entrances, one on Flinders Street and the other in Federation Square. Visitors need to be able quickly scan the streetscape and identify that they’ve ‘found the right place’. For visitors in wheelchairs or with prams, the wayfinding phase also reveals the ease or otherwise of finding an easy rolling entrance.
- Arrivals: how do visitors understand that they have ‘arrived’ at ACMI and begin to orient themselves inside? Once a visitor steps inside ACMI through one of our entrances, how do they know that they are in the ‘right place’? If they have arrived at the Flinders Street entrance, for example, how do they know that the cinemas are two floors above them? Or that a major temporary exhbition is underneath them?
- Transition: how do visitors behave as they move from arrival into the main purpose of their visit if they are coming to an exhibition, public program, or coming to see a film? Here we discover the ways in which visitors behave as they wait for friends and family, or move through the interstitial spaces of the building. Perhaps their child needs the bathroom, or they need a seat with clearly signposted wi-fi to Snapchat a message that they’ve arrived.
- Primary visit: how do they engage with ACMI during an exhibition, film or program? The primary visit phase is most similar to traditional audience research — observing what takes place inside a particular gallery or cinema.
- Post visit: how do visitors behave immediately afterwards while still in our building? After an exhibition or film, the post-visit moment is usually about ‘decompression’. Are there places to talk about what they’ve just seen or done? How easily signposted are they? Are those spaces designed to be more or less social? Is the museum shop in a line of sight?
- Motivating a return visit: how do visitors make the decision to ‘come back’? Having visited and departed, what are the triggers that remind a visitor that there’s more to see and do, what motivates that return?
The map has already generated a lot of internal discussion and many of the low hanging fruit have started to be addressed — and over the summer visitors to ACMI will begin to notice small changes. Meld’s graphic design presents the information in a very accessible and approachable manner. And whilst few staff have been ‘surprised’ by the findings, they represent that ‘collective knowledge’ that we were seeking to make legible across the organisation.
Longer term, though, the map (and accompanying report) provides us with a snapshot of a moment in time against which to measure changes — and to reference when we are looking for how certain changes might impact other systems.
Stay tuned for the next phase.
