Experiments in Audio: First Steps
Although many instances of museum interpretation that go beyond the label have had their day, the concept of an audioguide has persisted since its first implementation in 1952 by the the Stedelijk Museum. With this in mind, it seemed like an obvious area for the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) to revisit to see if we could enrich our offer to audiences, both in-gallery and beyond.
We knew that the NGS had experimented with iOS apps for audio in the past, with mixed results. We believe this may have been primarily due to the limitations around our Wi-Fi infrastructure, but another factor would have been the limited adoption of iPhones (accounting for only 14% of mobile device market share at that time).
The world has shifted dramatically since then, with significantly increased smartphone adoption, the rise in the importance of understanding digital audiences for museums and galleries, and the changing approaches to how we tell visitors about our collections and how we present it to them. We therefore decided to embark on a research project to establish the best ways to create engaging, appealing audio content and bring it to our audiences inside the gallery and beyond.
Getting to Know You: Learning about our Audiences
We started off our investigations in early 2017 by looking at some top examples of audio content in museums and the thought and processes that went into designing the experience. Our first port of call was a set of research done by Frankly, Green and Webb around audio and mobile experiences with the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with a comparison of what other museums and visitor attractions offered.
Our initial analysis identified the following themes which seemed to be ubiquitous across the sector:
It seems that audio/multimedia guides are an expectation for specific visitor groups.
Most significant museums at a national or international level will offer some form of digital guide to complement the physical visit, despite an uptake of only 5–8%.
Visitor engagement increases with the use of audio/multimedia guides.
In cases where a visitor took a guide, this made a positive impact on the visitor satisfaction, as well as the time they spent in the museum.
Time issues are the most significant deterrent to uptake.
A lack of time for a visit may deter a visitor from taking an audio guide. For example, research indicates a visitor may only be on site for 30 minutes to an hour, so think they don’t have time to make the most out of an audio/multimedia guide.
Telling a story always beats simple recitation of fact.
It’s well established (through our own visitor research and this Museums and the Web Paper) that the creation of a genuinely engaging experience is highly reliant on telling a story. Such stories should explore multiple aspects of a collection or a work, rather than a traditional, historical and fact focused narrative. Organisations, therefore, need to focus on a storytelling approach when creating content. As well as writing stories to experience within the physical space, there are opportunities and interest in ways that these can be taken beyond the limits of the collection — going from the realm of an audio tour into that of the podcast.
As well as these findings, we also discovered a wide variety of content types and delivery mechanisms used across the sector, which reported varying degrees of success, including:
- The “standard issue” audio guide — with optional highlight and trail tours that are adjustable to differing time constraints.
- Specialist tours — for groups with differing needs. Examples could include tours and activities for family visitors or specialist descriptions to enhance the experience for visitors with visual impairments.
- Exploration narratives — which lead the visitor throughout their journey and possibly into the post-visit, blurring the lines between an audio tour and a podcast. This concept is an approach taken by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) with their audio walks.
- Soundscapes — where rather than supply a narration, suggested music or a curated playlist accompany a work.
- Lecture recordings — to deliver on-demand through MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)platforms.
As for delivery, some of the most common examples we’ve come across are:
- Button operated or touchscreen devices — either bespoke or built around a smartphone.
- RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) devices — which trigger audio content based on the user’s position within a display.
- Smartphone apps — which can utilise features such as GPS and connection with social media to encourage ‘sharing’ of the visit.
- Mobile-first websites — which can deliver audio and video content to a multitude of mobile and tablet devices.
Many of these options seemed instantly appealing to adopt. However, if we wanted to ensure that we created an experience that was successful, we first needed to determine what the needs of our audience were. After all, a digital offer will only form one part of the visitor experience of the gallery; and if we developed a solution without understanding their needs and visit behaviour, it would most likely be doomed to fail.
If innovation is your goal, you cannot pin the answer down in advance.
— Marthe de Vet, Head of Education, Van Gogh Museum
The Visitor Journey Model: A Template for Uptake
An invaluable tool for assessing how we would design and deliver any solution in this area was the Visitor Service Model, a version of which was proposed by Laura Mann in her work with the Met in 2015. It defines visitors access to a service as a series of barriers (I prefer to think of them as hurdles) which need to be overcome to allow the service to function correctly. If the visitor falls at one of them, they’re unlikely to pass the rest.
In adopting this model as a framework to assess what form an audio offer would take, we were then better equipped to identify what would have to be done to deliver an audio experience that worked for our users.
Putting into Practice: An Exhibition Audioguide?
By early 2017, we felt that we were beginning to understand what visitors would expect from audio within the gallery space and what possibilities it could have for us as an organisation by early 2017. At this time, the planning for the galleries summer exhibition series was in full swing, with three major shows taking place across our sites.
For our photography show, Hill and Adamson: A Perfect Chemistry which took place at the Portrait Gallery, there was a question about how we could enrich the experience for the visitor. Our other two shows, Beyond Caravaggio and True to Life featured video content that introduced visitors to the exhibition and explored their key themes.
An in-gallery video wasn’t an option for the limited space within the Portrait Gallery, however, there was a strong desire to tell the multitude of stories we had about these works. Our collection of Hill and Adamson photographs is one of the largest in the world and formed the basis for the Catalogue Raisonné of their work; we therefore had a lot of research which had the potential to become engaging content for visitors.
With the audio research that we had already gathered, we then proposed a pilot project to create an audioguide experience for the exhibition. This proposal was approved and so we got to work on our first major test of what we had learned so far…
The design, implementation and evaluation of this pilot project will be the subject of a future post. If you’d like to take a look at it in the interim though, why not visit https://audio.nationalgalleries.org on your mobile phone?
With thanks to all the brilliant researchers and digital teams whose research helped get us to this point — especially the guys at Frankly, Green and Webb
