The Importance of Visitor Experience Strategy
Why do you need a visitor experience strategy? Customer Experience is something on which the “for-profit” world focuses real money. After all, there is an obvious return on investment. You get what your customer wants; you give it to them; you make more money. But, in non-profit, this is a much more challenging equation. In …
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Systems-Thinking
There is this myth that some of us are details-people and some of us are big-picture folks. Most of us are able to toggle between the two ways of making sense of the world. The more successful of us are able to do this effectively and efficiently. Others struggle, focusing too intently on one or …
Museums Risk, Experimentation, and Contemporary Topics — Blog Schedule
The Beginning Not to long ago, I was embroiled in a serious of disparate conversations on Twitter. The topics varied from social media to salary. But, in each, there seemed some essential kernels that stuck. With a field as large as museums (bigger than solar), it felt as if there are some big differences in …
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Agile Thinking to Manage Change
Agile was a buzzword, drawn from software designers who came up with an effective means of developing, testing, iterating, and launching in the most efficient manner. There are plenty of posts that talk about using Agile (and related iterative processes) for personal development. For me, I find agile particularly useful when thinking about weathering change. …
Make Museums Great Again? Fear of Change in Museums
Anyone who has worked for me has heard my favorite old adage, “Change is the only constant.” I have seen 200 interns (yes, I counted them) and numerous staff through countless institutional changes. The roils of change were so continuous we lived in a constant state of low-grade institutional motion sickness. Why is change so …
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Keep Clean Data
Data seems pretty cut and dried, but don’t be fooled. There are plenty of ways to fold in bias. Here are some concrete steps to help you do your best to counteract the most common pitfalls. Start with a clean tool/ protocol to collect data. 1. Keep data clean There are plenty of ways to …
Its Not the Destination OR Journey Mapping for Museums
Touchpoints Visitor experience is everyone’s job, not just those people who have “visitor” or “experience” in their title. Picture your visitor. What is the first thing that comes to mind? What are they doing? Buying a ticket? Standing in your gallery? Reading your labels. These are the types of touchpoints that are the focus …
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What Museums can Learn from Libraries
Museums and libraries are like sister institutions, descended of the same parent–the love of knowledge. However, like siblings, there are as many things that connect them as separate them. Both have collections. Both value education. Both serve the same general public. And, yet, there are so many differences. Why Libraries? First, let’s think about scale. …
Exhibition Cocktails or Why Museums Need User Experience Designers
I admit that I am biased. I am a trained User Experience Designer. But, you don’t have to has an M.S. to know that visitors come to museums for experiences. Now, we could get into a debate about the type of experience. Sitting quietly in a gallery is a type of experience. We often think …
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On Objectivity & What Museums Can Learn from News Organizations
Recently, Koven Smith retweeted an article from the American Alliance of Museums that unpacked the contention that museums are one of the most trusted sources of knowledge. An overwhelming number of respondents (87%) felt that museums were “one of the most trustworthy sources of objective information.” As the AAM article lays out, visitors did not …
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