The Benefits of Walk-and-Talk Interviews with Museum Visitors

We recently conducted an exploratory study of the efficacy of various interpretative strategies at the Denver Art Museum (DAM). Given the goals of the study, we proposed an infrequently-used method: walk-and-talk interviews.

What are walk-and-talk interviews and how do you conduct them?

Walk-and-talk interviews are a qualitative method with the essential characteristics being that you are moving through a space with a person(s) and talking together. The method can be implemented in different ways. For example, at one end of the spectrum, some think interview participants should guide the conversation, identify the physical environment, and direction of movement. Others think the researcher should lead the conversation, physical environment, and direction of movement.

For the Denver Art Museum, we recruited visitors in the museum’s lobby and invited them to participate in a 30-minute conversation with us about how the museum presents information.  During conversations, we took visitors to seven spots in the museum that use different types of interpretive strategies, from a spot in the Arts of Africa galleries that includes a narrative video, environmental video, artworks, and labels to a spot in the Indigenous Arts of North America galleries. 

The Arts of Africa Gallery and the Indigenous Arts of North America Galleries at the Denver Art Museum. 

We conducted 15 walk-and-talk interviews in total with individuals, pairs, and trios.  We used a semi-structured approach where we guided visitors to specific places with general objectives to prompt conversation, such as what was interesting or confusing. But, we left space for tangential conversations or stops at other artworks while we were together. Conversations were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis. Visitors were paid $30 in cash for their time.

What is the value of walk-and-talk interviews?

I find this qualitative method has many values.

I am not just an evaluator, but a museum greeter! 

Since we recruited people just after admissions, I became part of the welcoming team inviting visitors into the museum. I became a pseudo tour guide as we walked and talked our way to spots across the museum, keeping visitors apprised of where we were in the building, pointing out the special exhibition, or generally responding to their exclamations, ohs, and ahs. For instance, when we passed the Space Command exhibition, a high-sensory space, I told them how the installation just opened to the public that day. And, when we passed the Islands Beyond Blue exhibition, I mentioned how they had to come back to see the site-specific art installation in conversation with the museum’s Arts of Oceania collection (and sometimes we detoured through there too). 

No Man is an Island (with Atomic Rainbow) by Niki Hastings-McFall in the exhibition, Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection

The evaluator gains a deep understanding of the visitor experience via both the conversational nature of the method as well as walking together through museum spaces.

While as the evaluator, I had particular questions in mind to explore the study objectives, walk-and-talk interviews are ultimately more conversational. During the walk, we talked a little about everything from what brought them to town, their work, what museums they like, and more. Not only does this personal context help me understand the feedback visitor’s provide, but it also helps me ask better questions driven by curiosity about their unique experiences. Potentially, their feedback was even more honest and uninhibited than it might be in other interview contexts given our sustained time together and rapport built.

Being with a visitor in the museum space is revelatory. I am sharing the physical experience of being in the museum space with visitors, having as much the same physical experience as two different people can have. Walking and talking with visitors helps connect what meaning they make to the physicality of the museum experience. Further, being in the space together in front of an exhibit lets the visitor physically point out where a breakdown in understanding happens or how. For example, a visitor who happens to be a graphic designer told me how the purple vertical line on a label caused her to confuse the image of the community voice speaker as the artwork’s artist.

Community Voices label for Headdress by a Nimiipuu artist

The evaluator can more effectively communicate about the visitor experience, having witnessed it so deeply.

The vividness and deep understanding I gain through walk-and-talks helps me synthesize and share findings with our clients in equally vivid and practical ways. While there are big ideas that trend across many of the conversations, there are also beautifully illustrative quotations from individual visitors that provide deep insight when paired with the gallery context. For example, in our report for the Denver Art Museum, we had a slide showing a clip from a video in which the artist Rose Simpson describes her struggles with identity and acceptance, paired with a quotation from a walk-and-talk interview participant that so nicely summarizes those exact ideas. The reporting is storytelling, bringing together narrative text, photographs, and quotations. The goal is to take readers on the same journey we went through with individual visitors in the gallery. 

Slide from our Denver Art Museum report depicting a screenshot from a video of Rose Simpson speaking, alongside a quotation from a walk-and-talk interview

Visitors enjoy it!  

The recent 2023 Visitor Studies Association conference had many sessions about creative and innovative methods that are visitor friendly, and I would certainly count walk-and-talk interviews among them. Almost all of the visitors we asked to participate in the walk-and-talks agreed, and they all really seemed to enjoy it. For example, one woman told me she was so “lucky” I invited her to participate. I ended up taking a selfie with another participant who I discovered a shared connection with during our conversation (which was a delightful surprise as a Pennsylvanian speaking with visitors in Colorado who happened to know a museum educator friend in Kansas!). And, when I saw a couple who I had spoken with earlier in the day, they yelled over to me to say they used their cash thank-you gift to buy drinks at the museum. As an evaluator, I often worry about the extractive potential of our work, but the walk-and-talk method made me feel like I was promoting human connections and genuine well-being as part of our evaluative work.

Why you may not want to use walk-and-talk interviews?

Certainly there are contexts when walk-and-talk interviews are not appropriate. For example, it is an able-bodied method in name and practice. They are also a labor intensive method, requiring skilled interviewers. Yet the many benefits of the method encourage me that it is worth revisiting in the future.