Visitor Studies: The Three Fundamentals

Following in the well-trodded footsteps of Randi Korn, museums are now putting more emphasis and serious time into their value and research of visitors. In an article off of Randi Korn's website, Studying Your Visitors: Where to Begin, it is laid out in the most simplistic terms of the three basic types of visitor studies and the appropriate times to conduct them. As well, the article hammers home the importance of visitor studies and the valuable information that can be obtained by performing them.

Overall, the three most common and unattested evaluations are Front End, Formative and Summative. Now Front End, as the name would suggest, is taking a visitor evaluation during the early planning stages of an exhibit so that a museum can really get to know what it is that visitors desire from a new exhibition. This helps the museum to spend their limited funding more effectively in an attempt to draw in the maximum amount of visitors possible.

Secondly, Formative evaluations are taken during the design stage up through and into the actual framing and construction of the exhibit. Visitors, at times, are invited to come through exhibits during the construction phase and evaluate what they think of the preliminary design. This makes visitors feel as if they are more a part of the process of the new exhibit, as well as, it allows the museum to potential change or modify in the most cost efficient way possible. 

Lastly, there is the summative evaluation. Perhaps the most common already in the museum community, summative evaluations are used to examine a visitors' experience with individual components within the final, opened exhibit. This type of evaluation lets the museum know how well each step of the exhibit planning and creating process has culminated and resinated with visitors.

Personally, I think that utilizing more evaluations in a more diverse way will allow museums to better understand the enjoyment and experience visitors are achieving through their visits, while also "grading" a museum on their effectiveness of delivering their mission statement to serve and educate it's visitors without a large margin of error or flaws.

#MuseumGrades #VisitorInterpretation #VisitorEvaluations #FrontEndFormativeSummative #RandiKorn

http://randikorn.com/docs/studying_your_visitors_where_to_begin.pdf