How to improve an art exhibit through audience evaluation
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926). The Doge’s Palace, 1908. Oil on canvas, 32 × 39 in. (81.3 × 99.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Gift of A. Augustus Healy, 20.634. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
The Brooklyn Museum targets people of all levels of interest in art. That said, it’s important that their content layout entices visitors of all levels of art expertise. To assess the exhibition’s effectiveness, our team conducted several research methods to understand how the role of the layout and design effect their visitors’ understanding of the exhibition. Through this study, we identified several opportunities to improve the visitor experience of the Monet to Marisot exhibition.
The challenge
The Brooklyn Museum’s Monet to Morisot Exhibition
The Brooklyn Museum recently put on an exhibit featuring nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artworks from their collection by artists born in Europe or its colonies: Monet to Morisot. To evaluate how well visitors of all art expertise levels understood the exhibition, we focused on how:
Layout affects participants in navigating the exhibition
Participants interact with didactic content
The exhibit environment influences people’s behavior and engagement with the art and the space
The role that text, physical environment, spatial layout, colors, and overall environment have in influencing people’s behavior and experience in the exhibit
Text engages or does not engage them
Our Goal
To understand the role of the layout and design in participants' experience and understanding of the exhibition.
The Team
Jamie Chen
Jun H. Kok
Rachel Jackson
Verena Tanzil
Chris Denney
Daisy Garcia
Danielle Kingberg
Devin Alford
Key Questions
For exhibition layout:
How do visitors navigate the exhibition?
Do visitors understand that the exhibition is divided into two rooms?
Do the curved walls help visitors to navigate through the space?
For didactic content:
Where and how often do visitors read?
Did the image on the didactics help to draw the visitors’ attention?
My Role(s)
Project Manager - As a highly organized professional, I fostered virtual collaborative discussions to efficiently synthesize data in Miro, and Google Sheets and organized meetings as needed.
UX Researcher - I conducted a number of research methods including in-gallery observations, post gallery walk-through interviews, and “think aloud” sessions to address these objectives. I also worked with the team to analyze the data, surface key findings, and craft recommendations.
Reporting - I assisted in building the presentation to piece together a compelling story that clearly informed the Brooklyn Museum on how to improve the visitor experience of the Monet to Marisot exhibition.
Our methods and tools
Observations
We used signage near the entrance to indicate visitors were being observed when they the exhibition. With the visitor's consent, one of the team’s researchers observed their behavior as they navigated through the exhibit by tracking:
When they entered the exhibit
Where they stopped
What they did at each stop
How long they spent at each stop
When they exited the exhibit
Research Team
66 observations were completed. This allowed us to quantify visitor behavior in a way that assessed what they were doing the most and where they spent the most time in the exhibit.
Interviews
After each participant completed their visit, we asked them to participate in a brief interview which inquired about their basic information along with five questions about their experience. This allowed us to understand participants’:
Familiarity with art and art museums
Overall impressions of the exhibit
Influences on directions taken
How the meaning of the exhibit was comprehended
Think aloud sessions
Six participants were asked to participate in order to offer insights into what participants were thinking and doing as they went through the exhibit. participants were asked additional questions throughout their experience to understand why they went particular directions, their thoughts on the layout of the artwork, the labels, and the collection as a whole. This portion was intended to offer additional context confirmation for any discrepancies in the observations.
Tools
-
To input the data from the interviews and Talk Aloud sessions to later analyze into sentiment analysis and word clouds
-
To transcribe the audio recordings from the Talk Aloud sessions
-
To create visual representations of most frequently used words in interviews and Talk Aloud sessions
-
To compile the data and further insights on participant behaviors
-
To create the data visualizations
-
To create the presentation
Metrics
Average time spent
Total stops
Initial Insights
73% of participants had a good experience navigating the exhibit
One participant stated “[It was] Perfect. The round walls are beautiful. I have never seen round walls in an art exhibit be used like that”.
Only nine participants stated confusion such as, “It felt like I didn’t know where the beginning or the end was, especially with the two doorways”.
56% learned something new from the exhibit
Mentioning they were familiar with the artist, but had never seen this work by them.
19 minutes spent on average in the exhibit.
This is great since the benchmark for average time spent in an exhibition is 10 minutes.
Note: It’s possible that our participants’ average duration was influenced by being observed.
78% of total stops were to look at artwork
When participants read labels, they mentioned it was to confirm the artist, but also mentioned how they learned something new from some of the labels/didactics. 23% of participants read none of the didactics.
6% of participants missed the Land/Sea/Air section
During our observations and Talk Aloud sessions, multiple researchers were approached by participants inquiring whether the additional room was part of the exhibition before proceeding.
3 improvements identified
Participants were confused when accessing certain artwork labels and when determining if a room was part of the exhibit. They also missed some didactics due to how they navigated through the exhibit.
Why did participants miss some of the didactics?
59% of participants entered the exhibition and turned left to proceed through the exhibition per Figure 1. When we inquired about this in interviews, participants mentioned their decision was due to concerns about crowds, something that caught their attention, or because of researchers bunched near the entrance. At the same time, 50% mentioned that they had no clear direction in mind.
Figure 1: The directions participants went from the entrance of the exhibition
From these observations, we identified key areas participants missed (as shown in Figure 2). Most participants missed the “Introduction” and “Collection” didactics, along with the “Posing” didactic and the artworks on the same wall.
Figure 2: Areas missed in the exhibition
Additionally the wall color had a negative impact on the ability for some participants to read the didactics. One participant described how “Words on the yellow wall are easier to read, as opposed to the clay color”. See Figure 3 for reference.
Figure 3: Didactic on the “yellow” versus “clay color”
How can the Brooklyn Museum improve users’ access to these didactics?
Move the introduction and collection didactic to the left of the entrance.
Per Figure 2, up to 30% of participants missed the introduction and collection didactics. We recommend moving these texts to the left side of the entrance and the sculpture to the right, as indicated in Figure 4. This will improve the likelihood of visitors reading these two didactics by aligning with the most common direction visitors go upon entry and encourage them to proceed in the curated direction. It also will subsequently position the text on yellow to make them easier to read.
Figure 4: Recommended location of the Introduction and Collection didactics (on the right)
How well did users navigate through the exhibition?
Based on the Talk Aloud sessions, I found that participants experienced mixture of emotions throughout their visit. Most are neutral, but it’s also worth noting that they experienced more positive than negative emotions.
While talking through their visit, the most common words used to describe what they were seeing or doing included “Okay”, “Different”, “Good”, “Beautiful” and “Nice”.
Figure 5: Common emotions while in the exhibition
Through the audio recordings, I categorized the descriptions of their experience into five key categories: Artwork, layout, labels, wall color, and wayfinding as shown in Figure 6. Based on this analysis, I found that their overall sentiment was mostly positive or neutral across all categories.
Most of the negative sentiment was identified in the layout, labels, and wayfinding. For example, one participant mentioned during their talk-aloud session, “I can't quite tell which way to go. But maybe I'll try through here”.
Figure 6: Overall sentiment by key category
Based on our heatmap, participants spent most of their time in the first six sections of the exhibition collectively. By individual section comparison, participants spent the most their time in the “Land/Sea/Air” section, but there was less overall foot-traffic due to wayfinding issues. As mentioned earlier, 6% of participants missed the “Land/Sea/Air” section.
During our observations and Talk Aloud sessions, multiple researchers were approached by participants inquiring whether the additional room was part of the exhibition before proceeding.
Figure 7: Heatmap of visitor navigation flow
How can the Brooklyn Museum make it easier for users to wayfind through the exhibit?
Add signage to indicate that they should proceed into Land/Sea/Air
When asked, very few members mentioned issues with navigating through the exhibition. At the same time, at least 50% of participants inquired if the “Land/Sea/Air” section was part of the exhibit. We recommend including a label near the entrance of the “Land/Sea/Air” section from the “Religion” section to direct visitors to continue into the next room. This will reduce confusion for visitors and improve their wayfinding experience.
Figure 8: Suggested wall location and text
Why was it difficult for users to find sculpture labels?
Multiple participants mentioned confusion when trying to find the label for one of the sculptures in the “Working” section. One participant stated, “The pieces of statues should be on the center instead of on the walls, and the description should be inside the glass”. Some sculptures had the labels on their platforms, while others were located elsewhere. Figure 9 shows the sculpture where participants had the most difficulty finding the label, which was against the wall.
Figure 9: Sculpture with text on the wall
How the Brooklyn Museum make it easier for users to find labels of sculptures within the exhibit?
Develop a labeling convention for sculptures
Multiple participants mentioned confusion when trying to access a specific sculpture label in the “Working” section of the exhibit. After a further comparison of the sculptures in the space, we found that there were some consistencies depending on the platform shapes, but the styles were varied in location.
For better consistency, we recommend putting the label on the platform with the sculpture, as shown in Figure 10. Creating a consistent method of labeling sculptures will reduce confusion for participants as they’ll come to expect where they can find the label for each sculpture they explore within the exhibition.
Figure 10: Recommended label location
Conclusion
The Monet to Morisot exhibit is well received by the majority of visitors who have great things to say about the artworks and gallery space.
With these changes, we feel that it will make wayfinding through the curated gallery route, provide easier access to all labels of interest, and improve the overall visitor experience.
As next steps, there could be an opportunity for more research to be conducted on the pictures included in the didactics to see if it helps visitors’ understanding of each section of the exhibition. There could also be more research done to see if there should be more deliberate use of color to segment each of the exhibition’s sections.
“The maps were particularly interesting, we’d like to share it with the rest of the team (including my boss and head of design)...as a quick way to reference...We’re visual people so we like the flow of the maps... It’s a quick way to get our attention.”
Limitations
Observations: Not all evaluators used the same methodology when observing participants in the exhibit so the amount of time spent in each gallery section of the exhibit is based on only 60.6% of the 66 observations completed. For example, the time spent in each section was also omitted during the six Think Aloud sessions. Additionally, not all evaluators counted the Collection separate from the Introduction section. As a result, the averages for each section are based on the total captured in each section (visits ranging from 21 to 63) respectively vs. the total number of observations (66). This makes sense because not all participants visited all of the gallery sections during their visit.
Audio Transcriptions: Due to limited time, the recordings were transcribed and analyzed through two tools (SightX and talks.pratt.com). As we went through the recordings to determine sentiment based quotes, we found that there were numerous mistakes in the talks.pratt transcriptions. The sentiment assigned by SightX’s AI was also overwhelmingly neutral. To overcome these limitations, we used a different tool to obtain the frequency of the most used words and compiled them into a word cloud using wordclouds.org. We also spent additional time listening to the audio and comparing it against the transcriptions to pull out relevant quotes from the recordings and assign sentiment along with emotion where we were able.
References
Hayward, J. (2006, Spring). What is a Museum Evaluator. https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1zxzEcIo9O8-R_DstpUvfT5LfApqyKp67
Serrell, Beverly. “Paying Attention: The Duration and Allocation of Visitors’ Time in Museum Exhibitions.” Curator (New York, N.Y.) 40, no. 2 (1997): 108–125