How can we find out what visitors think?
Doing visitor studies before, during, and after exhibitions are planned and opened provides valuable and useful information.
Front-end Evaluation: Evaluation can take place before or during conceptual planning to find out what visitors know about the topic of the exhibition under development. This information is useful for building bridges between what visitors already know and what the exhibition is going to be about.
Formative Evaluation: Evaluation during exhibition design, especially to test prototypes of interactive exhibit elements, tests the intuitiveness of exhibit interfaces, the efficacy of graphics, and the communication effectiveness of exhibit mock-ups.
Critical Review and Remedial Evaluation: Evaluation of exhibitions immediately after opening (or better yet, during a “soft” opening) can help identify areas needing remediation. Exhibit labels produced in a temporary format can be tested in the complete context of the whole exhibition before the copy is finalized.
Summative Evaluation: Summative evaluation of exhibitions gives you information about visitors' use of the exhibition and its impact on them: What did they do, think, and feel in the exhibition? What parts captured the most attention? What did visitors find meaningful? Did they get the Big Idea?
Case studies
Summative evaluation workshops
Unobtrusive tracking-and-timing studies and exit questionnaires have been used to evaluate many different types of museum exhibitions. These two summative evaluation methods effectively and efficiently capture evidence of visitors' immediate learning behaviors and impacts from an exhibition. Baseline data are available for comparison purposes, enabling museum professionals to use these techniques to strive for better practices.
Theoretical underpinnings, practical advantages, and limitations of these techniques are discussed in a one- or two-day workshop. Each method is thoroughly reviewed, and participants practice in a real museum setting. Data analysis and reporting formats are introduced.
Serrell has hired and trained data collectors in these two methods for more than 25 museum projects. Workshops are also available for in-house staff or museum association members.
Other SERVICES :
LABEL WRITING . CONCEPTUAL
PLANNING . FRAMEWORK