Content Considerations by Visitor Segment
Museums have a good number of people (infrequent and regular visitors), who have a need for fairly general information. Within that group, you have a small portion that is especially unlikely to know your norms. This small group, infrequent visitors, is incredibly important. In design, they often say design for the extremes. In other words, …
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Onboarding and Interpretation
Museum interpretation professionals are creating content for people who generally know less than them. Getting the right amount of content requires understanding the visitor. Tools like content mapping can help organizations get their content right. But, all museum professionals need to remember that their visitors have different baseline knowledge levels. Onboarding is a classic corporate …
Content Journey Mapping to Hone Interpretation Planning
Content in museums where theory becomes practice. The best-laid plans of mice and curators are exposed to visitors. Then the visitors wander through the installation spaces like pinballs. Anyone who has wasted serious coin on pinball machines knows that winning the jackpot is equal parts skill and luck. Frankly, good interpretation is similarly a bit …
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Appetite for Content by Visitor Segment
When planning content, interpreters need to perform a weird type of math. After they formalize their process and create their goals, they then need to edit their desires to meet the visitor desires. Getting just the right amount of content is challenging to say the least. Part of the program is that the majority of visitors …
Hack the Bureaucracy : MuseumNext 2018 London
Hack the Bureaucracy ( #MuseumNext 2018) Note: These are my notes from my MuseumNext London 2018. I presented with Paul Bowers, so many of these come out of our shared conversations. I only included my parts of the talk in this write-up. Museum workers are doing amazing work. Millions of objects are in care for …
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Getting the “Right” Amount of Content
This graphic illustrates the relationship between the museum and visitors content desires. Notice there is an overlap as well as places where the two groups diverge. Getting the right amount of content is challenging. Firstly, content costs money and time. There is the writer, the researcher, and the editor–those people are all over-worked and underpaid. Content …
The Sweet Spot for Interpretation & Questions for the Whole Team
The ideal interpretive approach is about blending staff ideas with visitor insights. First and foremost, the team should consider and understand what visitors want from your organization using formal evaluation. Without this information, your organization is working blind. With that research in hand, the team needs to spend some time working together dealing with …
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The Sweet-Spot in Interpretive Approach & the Politics of Mounting Installations
Helping visitors engage in collections is a primary concern for museums. Museum professionals often partner with various vendors, consultants, and partners to do this work, for example commissioning firms to develop interactives for exhibitions. Mounting these installations can be exhausting and rife with interpersonal challenges. Visitors walking into spaces, ideally, have no idea how …
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Content Strategy Matrix for Developing Compelling Content (Graphic)
The best writing is complex. Persuasive text needs to inform in order to convince the reader. Inspiring texts often grow from a kernel of fact. Enjoyable texts are the best way to feed people information. While creative writers have more latitude to move their readers, every writer needs to understand how to balance these aspects …
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Thinking Systematically about Content / Interpretation in #Museums
Thinking systematically about content creation requires having a facile ability to navigate between communicating the overall idea and articulating the component concepts. The ideal systematic thinker is both a big picture and detail-oriented person. While some people seem naturally able to employ systematic thinking, practice can help anyone become more capable of working systematically. …
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