Visitor Experience
The Use of Importance-Performance Analysis in the Museum Sector
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yung-Neng Lin, Jingjing Zhou, Wenbin Wang
Detecting the strengths and weaknesses of the services they offer is a critical task for museums. Museums have to ensure they use what they have as efficiently as possible with limited resources available. In the past, however, most visitor studies in museums have only looked at either visitor expectations or actual service performance. We often find it hard to use the results of these studies into action. To tackle this issue, the importance-performance analysis has been used in this research to show how to assess visitor expectation and satisfaction in the Changsha Museum, China. The research demonstrates that it could help museums to determine which service attributes should have resources assigned to them first. In the study, a questionnaire survey of 379 visitors was conducted in the Changsha Museum to measure their expectation and actual performance of museum service attributes. Fieldwork was carried out over a three-month period, from 2nd of July to 8th of October, 2018. Visitors were asked fourteen questions about their expectations and satisfaction with services, and their answers recorded on a 5-point Likert scale. The result shows that importance-performance analysis technique is a good way of evaluating the expectation and satisfaction of museum service attributes. The importance-performance analysis clearly shows the strengths and weaknesses of the Changsha Museum. It helps museums to distribute their resources with more confidence. However, there is one limitation need be mentioned. Importance-performance analysis will not be appropriate across the whole museum sector because service attributes in different museums are not the same.
The Readable Museum: Vistor Representation and Its Implications
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carolin Südkamp
The paper examines what constitutes a readable museum space conceptually and pays attention to aspects of visibility/invisibility and access/exclusion of visitors (and employees). Consequently, the paper is both a conceptual and a methodological project. The object of study is not the exhibition as a text to be read by the visitor, but concerns how a museum can be read in its totality to call attention to the prevailing conditions at public institution. More specifically, the concern is the visual representation of museum spaces in communication with the public, for example on websites. First, the focus on visual representations of social realities in the images provides insights that do not rely on visitor numbers or underlying assumptions. Instead, the examination of a visual repository and the problematization of selection processes and interpretations offer an opportunity to understand what constitutes the museum visitor and what the implications of this are. Second, the methodological approach of this project also addresses the question of inequality and access. It includes both images selected by the institution and images that I have photographed. I employ a communicative perspective based on the claim that language, symbols and the ways in which we communicate constructs and shapes realities in constitutive ways (Sanders,Koschman,&Isbell, 2015). I supplement the question of how to read a museum by asking what the assumptions are of who will be visible and in what ways, by problematizing the museum’s and my own choice of images, and contextualizing the depictions to aid my interpretation.
Multiperspectivity in the Museum: The Response from Urban Museums on a Super Diverse Society
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Janssenswillen, Lore Suls, Wil Meeus, Indra Wolfaert
The cultural and ethnic diversity in most Western countries has significantly increased in the last decades.This increasing diversity has important implications for museums, especially in the urban context. Museums should incorporate the urban super diversity, in terms of composing the collections as well as of attracting diverse groups of visitors. The aim of this project was to examine how multiperspectivity can be an explicit policy strategy for cultural education and how it could be implemented in the collection presentation and public relations of museums in ways that its effects could be measured. According to the principles of design-based research three design teams were established with staffs of three important Antwerp museums, in particular the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) and the Red Star Line Museum (RSL) as well as researchers from three teacher education programmes, in particular the specific teacher programme in visual arts of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp from the Artesis Plantijn University College and of the specific teacher education programme in history and in behavioral and cultural sciences of the University of Antwerp. Each team was responsible for the analysis of the museum collection from the angle of multiperspectivity and for the development of a policy strategy for multiperspectivity. In our paper we focus on the results of the one-year research project which comes to an end in June 2019.
Interpreting Priorities: How Museums Balance Competing Obligations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jillian Decker, Jerisha Parker Gordon
Museums face competing priorities every day: the mantle as the authority on our content; the responsibility to our constituents to provide compelling and entertaining experiences; the imperative to expand and diversify our audience; the obligation to our Board and stakeholders for sustainability. How do we balance these disparate responsibilities without losing sight of our mission and the communities we are committed to serving? By examining the messaging we use and the programs we offer, this study considers how to balance these priorities. Coming from different corners of the museum world - a hands-on children's museum and a military history education center - we uncover ways to address our common challenges.
