The most common types of projects are:
Visitor Orientation Studies / Wayfinding Audits
Studies of Visitor Behavior & Use of Services
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington DC, conducted a national search for an evaluation firm in 2003, and we were honored to be selected to evaluate visitor experience regarding the Museum's Permanent Exhibition. Approximately ten years after opening, senior Museum staff wanted to put their next 10-year plan on solid footing by including information about the audience. The issues included assessing what people are learning from a visit, the impact of experiencing the Permanent Exhibition (including the emotional character of the experience), how some of the specific exhibits were being used and understood, and a need for a clear analysis of the challenges in orientation and wayfinding.
On the issue of visitor orientation, we analyzed topics such as the timed ticketing system, the spatial cues people use (or neglect to use) in finding and entering the Permanent Exhibition, how and where verbal directions are used and how people understand those directions - sorting out the big challenges from the little ones based on the perceptions and behavior of the audience.
You might wonder why there are wayfinding problems when the architecture of the Museum seems so straightforward: as you enter the building you come to a large atrium, and the entrance to the Permanent Exhibition is off to one side at the middle of that atrium. However, the Visitor Services staff had plenty of evidence, every day, that visitors do not necessarily have an easy time of figuring out what to do and where to go. At least three contextual factors probably underlie the challenges in this situation: the building may not have been designed for the quantity of visitors it gets, there have been significant changes in security screening since it opened (people no longer enter in the middle of the façade as intended; they enter at the left, then have to go all the way to the right to get a ticket, etc.), and many visitors are not prepared for the logistics here because they differ from every other museum on the Mall and most museums that you would visit elsewhere (e.g., the security screening is like that at an airport, the timed ticketing system is a way to avoid making visitors stand in long lines but the "tickets" are free and are called 'passes,' and the exhibition is one long linear path without choices). In addition, there are spatial cues that are easy to misread, such as the presence of a grand staircase in the atrium (but it's the exit not the entrance to the exhibition), and when it's finally time for you to enter, visitors feel that they are crowded through industrial-looking doorways into one of three small rooms (elevators!) where a video starts - which some people think IS the show, until the doors open on the other side and they exit into the beginning of an exhibition, but they have no idea where they are in the building.
Our 'orientation audit' was of a type that we have conducted for numerous other museums, building on the problems identified by floor staff, supplemented by tracking and other observations of visitors, listening to visitors as they waited on line and interacted with staff, and conducting some interviews at selected locations to see what people know about where they are and where they are going. We then write criteria for improving visitors' experiences and suggest a variety of strategies for resolving the problems, ranging from changes in wayfinding language to better spatial cues and changes in signage or printed materials. In other words, good wayfinding and visitor orientation is a system - not just a collection of signs - that can be implemented in a variety of ways. At the Holocaust Museum, we concluded that there are 16 challenges to visitor orientation, and documented several of them as substantial problems (two major ones, four moderately difficult). The Museum's cross-departmental task force studied and critiqued our analysis and is now moving ahead with a variety of kinds of improvements.
