AMNH has 5.5 Million Different Tours

The American Museum of Natural History hosts five and a half million visitors per year and each visitor can conduct their own personalized tour.

The museum’s Explorer app offers suggestions and directions to visitors so they can tailor their museum experience to their specific interests. The digital department at the museum strategically developed the app with the visitor experience in mind. Focusing on the digital interface and blending interpretative material and logistical context allow the museum to create a resource for broad audiences to personalize their experience.

Investing in visitor journal mapping helps the app evolve and adapt to visitor practices. With a museum the size of AMNH, appealing to various demographics while also maintaining service to the mission and enabling meaningful visits can be challenging. The creation of an app that not only makes the museum easily navigable and accessible, but also involves individualized suggestions, enables every one of the 5.5 million annual visitors to design a meaningful and specialized tour that might otherwise be missing in similarly sized institutions. The AMNH recognized the difficulty of being an institution that serves diverse cultures, multiple generations and various learning styles. The solution was to create a generic platform that digitized the museum’s resources so that each visitor can design their own tour.