This presentation summarises the visitor evaluation from the installations carried out as part of the AHRC Transforming Thresholds Project at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology (effect of image and sound) and New Walk Museum and Art Gallery Leicester (effect on invisible theatre).

1. Evaluating Visitor Experience in
Museum Foyers
AHRC Research Network: Transforming
Thresholds
Dr Ruth Page and Dr Ross
Parry, University of Leicester

2. Rationale for the project
• Museum Foyers are
significant spaces
– For visitors’ onsite
engagement
– For museums to
establish their identity
• But we don’t know that
much about them
– Academic research
– How visitors perceive
and behave in them

3. Transforming Thresholds as a
collaborative project
• Academics
– Different disciplines
– Different institutions and research centres
• Museum partners
– Different scale of Museum (Museum of London;
British Museum; Birmingham Museum and Art
Gallery; Leicestershire Arts and Museums; Petrie
Museum of Egyptian Archeology)
• Commercial partners

4. Aims of the project
• share and develop emerging fieldwork about
visitor experience in a range of foyers to
identify core principles for scaffolding visitors’
first on-site experience of museums
• develop methodology for measuring visitor
behaviour in threshold spaces

5. Can we draw on ideas from
• Eye-gaze
• Market
research
• Product
development
Retail
E-learning
• What do
people learn?
Gaming
Performance
• Reviews
• Audience
engagement

6. Complex range of visitor needs in the
foyer

7. ‘Evaluation’ from different
perspectives
• Purpose of the evaluation
– As part of the design process
• Gaming – beta testing
• Film – director’s interventions
– As market research
• Retail
– As ‘academic’ projects
• How do people use technologies? And how can this
knowledge help improve the technology/space
• Visitor experience
• Gathering v. Eliciting techniques

8. Challenges of using eliciting
techniques in foyers
• Surveys, polls, interviews, comments forms
• Thresholds may not be a place to dwell to answer
questions
– Health and safety issues
– Transactions that *need* to take place are more
important (purchasing tickets, security checks)
– Visitor has not experienced enough of the museum
space to answer any questions
– Their attention is on where they are going, not where
they are

9. Challenges of using observation
techniques in foyers
• Where to position cameras or observers?
• If you are using eye-tracking glasses (or
similar) you have to put these on/calibrate
them before the visitor enters the space
– Recruit in advance?
– Observers’ paradox?
• Restrictions on the GPS (works outside) but
inaccuracy of RFID tagging (inside)
• Ethics of covert recording

10. Research design
• What you want to find out determines the
methods you need to do the research 
• Our project has been trying to
– Find out more about visitor experience in different
foyers
– Evaluate our evaluation tools
• Used a range of eliciting and observation
methods in three museum entrance spaces
• As much to find out what kinds of evaluation
tools were useful as developing fieldwork

11. Case study #1: Petrie museum

12. Main questions
• Could we prepare visitors better for entering
the gallery space by adding thematically
appropriate images and sound to the
stairwell?
• What was role did the images play in
preparing visitors?
• What role did the soundscape play in
preparing visitors?

13. Evaluating the impact on visitor
experience
• Survey
– pre-installation and post-installation
– surveys completed mid-visit
– Mixture of quantitative and qualitative questions
• Visitors wore a mobile camcorder
– Inspired by eye-tracking research from retail
– pre-installation and post-installation
– What information could we gather about what
people actually looked at and their dwell time

14. What we hoped to do but did not
• Test whether there was an actual impact on
how visitors engaged with gallery exhibits
• -iSwipe polling stations
• Visitors could vote
– Which of these objects do you remember seeing a
picture of on the stairs?
• What went wrong
– The owner of the iSwipes did not leave them with
a power supply or stands!

15. A snapshot

16. Analysis of the visitor response
• Survey data was collated
• Qualitative responses were coded
– Sentiment
– Themes
• Respondents and results from the Survey

17. Who did we interview?
•
•
•
•
•
•
41 visitors (week 1 – 33% of the footfall)
45 visitors (week 2 – 30% of the footfall)
83.5% were first time visitors
Week 1: Women (63%), Men (37%)
Week 2: Women (49%), Men (51%)
Purpose for visit
– Entertainment (37%); Research (17%); Unplanned
(27%)

18. Sentiment analysis
(Description of stairwell as a whole)
70%
60%
50%
40%
Positive
30%
Negative
Neutral
20%
10%
0%
Week 1
Week 2

19. Sample responses (pre-installation)
• It was dark and narrow, I was looking at the
steps
• Very utilitarian, like the back stairs to an
office. You just watch the stairs.
• Depressing, unwelcoming, totally unexciting
• Sparse, you would expect a facsimile or a
hieyroglyph. I was not sure I was even going
the right way

20. Themes in the pre-installation
feedback
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0

21. Other suggestions
• Themes of transit
• Utility
– function on the stairwell as a functional space
• Anticipation
– Images/quotes might generate some expectation
• Attention
– Desire to look v. Not being able to stop and look

22. What did people remember seeing?
Week 1
Petrie's
portrait
8%
Quote 2
22%
Quote 1
23%
Door sign
30%
Petrie Logo
17%

23. What did people remember seeing?
Week 2
Stalae
frieze, 11
Gold
jewellery, 5
Egyptian
spoons, 7
Door
sign, 25
Pottery
fragment, 25
Petrie on
dig, 23
Petrie
Logo, 22
Quote 1, 24
Petrie's
portrait, 31 Quote 2, 29

24. A shift in salience?

25. How well did the images/signs prepare
you?
45%
40%
35%
30%
1 (very well)
25%
2
20%
3
15%
4
10%
5 (not at all)
5%
0%
Week 1
Week 2

26. How did the images help prepare you?
(Week 2 responses)
• We knew what we were coming to see. It was
good to have something to make the
transition from the modern world to research
• Petrie image maybe turns your attention on link to name of the museum
• Looked as though the collection had spilled
down the stairs. Good as intro, bad as liminal
experience

27. Additional themes
• Positive comments
– Suggestions that they were helping the visitors to
‘look better’
– Role of images in confirming the identity of the
museum
• Negative comments
– Resistance to the use of the space as a ‘canvas’
• Neutral comments
– Experience of stairwell as a space (links with utility
theme)

28. Reactions to the images (Week 2
responses)
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Positive
Negative
Neutral

29. Did you notice the sound?
No
44%
Yes
56%

30. Sentiment in responses to sound
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Positive
Negative
Neutral

31. How did the sound help prepare you?
Practicalities
4%
Information
29%
Ambience
67%

32. Quotes: relating sounds to ambience
• I really liked them. They get you into the right
mood
• There was a sense of exploration/adventure, it
was good not to be too
prescriptive, discovering museum on ones
own, sounds were discreet
• Sense of theatricality, put you in a different
space

33. Quotes: relating sounds to information
• It made me think of....
– A dig in Egypt
– Like being in a pyramid
– Nile scenes
• Confirmed I was in correct place - archaeology
museum
• Music instantly said 'this is what you are here
to see,' geographical and temporal
location, gave an idea of what you were
coming to see

34. Themes in responses
• Sound as evoking content
– Egyptian / archeology
• Sound as evoking emotion
– Reassuring/relaxing/calming
• Evidence of immersion/flow
• Capacity to generate a sense of space
– Imagined spaces (markets, Nile etc)
– Physical spaces (museum and its gallery)

35. How would I do the survey differently?
• Carry out evaluation in separate phases
– No image, no sound
– Just sound added
– Just images added
– Both image and sound added
• Other information we should have captured
– Were visitors on their own or in a group
• General principles: matching the questions
more exactly, limitations of Likert scales

36. Other technical adjustments
• Monitor the noise level during the experiment
for the following conditions:
– unoccupied but with the soundscape,
– occupied with the soundscape,
– occupied without the soundscape.
• With data for these conditions we could have
scientifically excluded responses from samples
where the occupational noise exceeded the
soundscape by a known / set threshold.

37. Participants for the Looxcie footage
• Recruited in advance
• Five in week 1 (one no show, one the
recording cut out half way through)
• Seven in week 2
• Unanticipated issues
– Although I asked people to book
appointments, several turned up at the same time
– They did not want to take the Looxcie off!
– Difficult for those wearing glasses

38. Coding process
• Looxcie footage was edited using Windows
Media Player
• Data coded
– time taken to walk through stairwell,
– approximate direction of gaze
– visual stimulus in the line of vision collated
• Cross referenced against the survey results
from the same participants

39. Data from the video footage
• Speed of moving through the stairwell
– Week 1: average time 25.4 seconds
– Week 2: average time 34.6 seconds
• Overall direction of gaze
– Week 1: 80% looked down to the stairs
– Week 2: 85% looked up at the walls

40. Frequency of items seen through
Looxcie
120
100
80
60
40
Week 1
20
0
Week 2

41. ‘Seen’ v. ‘Remembered’ items
(Week 1)
120
100
80
60
Looxcie
Survey
40
20
0
Door Sign
Petrie Logo
Quote 1
Quote 3

42. ‘Seen’ v. ‘Remembered’
(Week 2)
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Looxcie
Survey

43. ‘Seen’ but not ‘remembered’

44. But is size everything?
• Biggest discrepancy
between ‘seen’ (86%)
and ‘remembered’
(14%)
• Produced at A1 size
• Positioned on the
second landing

45. Stelae in situ

46. Dwell time (rough!)
• Items which appeared
in the viewfinder for >1
second more often than
<1 second
• Week 1
– Door sign
• Week 2
– Quote 1
– Quote 3
– Petrie on his Dig
• How do you interpret
that?
• A difference in
‘functional’ viewing and
‘image’ focused
viewing?

47. Interpretation?
• Evidence of under-stimulation (the overreporting of recalled images in week 1)
• Evidence of design overload (the underreporting of recalled images in week 2)
• Embodied experience of looking
– Rhythm
– Head alignment

48. Week 2 items with highest ‘dwell’ time

49. What I would do differently
•
•
•
•
•
Use proper eye-tracking glasses
Calibrate it all properly
Select sample more carefully
Interview participants about what they saw
Compare it with footage taken from in the
gallery spaces

50. Evaluation of the ‘Museum Players’
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery

51. Key question
• Would the presence of actors ‘performing’
improvised roles of the ‘engaged visitor’
influence visitor behaviour?

52. Evaluation tools
•
•
•
•
Survey (pilot study questionnaire in 2011)
Hand-drawn maps of visitor flow
Field notes
What we wanted to do but did not...
– Video footage captured by cameras worn by the
actors
– Problems with ethics and covert recording

53. Hand drawn maps

54. Collating the maps
(manually)
• Pilot study
– 237 people walked through (1/3)
– 461 people took a pathway with at least one dwell
point or a movement away from the main
thoroughfare.

55. Visitor Flow during visit
Straight through
Deviation
No actor
Individual
Actor
66%
33%
37%
63%
No actor
Group of
Actors
64%
36%
61%
39%

56. What we would do differently
• Digitally enabled production of the visitor
routes?
– Collected straight onto an iPad or tablet
• Digitally enabled analysis
– Scanning multiple maps to establish dominant
pathways

57. Results: Field notes
• On several occasions we witnessed
unequivocally, the Museum Players influence
visitors by simple non-verbal communication in
the form of modeling and copying. Visitors would
be distracted by what they were doing or from
their set path by the Player standing still and
reading the signs. We saw clearly the visitor
follow the modelling activity of the Player turning
their head towards the stairs and then copy
another Player who went up the stairs.

58. More field notes
• When the Players with instructions to seek interaction with
visitors did so, there were also interesting results. The more
gregarious of our Players politely approached a visitor in
the foyer who was about to exit the foyer into the museum.
The visitor was asked about a certain gallery and as they
didn’t know the answer the visitor paused before indicating
that the reception desk might help. The visitor
accompanied our Player to the desk and made sure they
got an answer. Instead of then carrying on their original
path into the museum, the visitor paused, turned back to
the desk and proceeded to ask several other questions. Of
course, perhaps our absent minded visitor had intended to
do this all along but it is easy to see how this visitor may
have been unobtrusively aided by our Player.

59. Survey responses (New Walk)
• Increase in words relating to ambience
(welcome, bright) and information
• But....a very small sample size