Matters of Experience is a podcast about the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. In this episode, Cathy Sigmond chats with hosts Brenda Cowan and Abby Honor about how we use data and insights from human-centered research to help museums connect with their audiences and shape great visitor experiences.

In recent years, the museum field, like much of the nonprofit world, has faced a reckoning when it comes to salary transparency and equity, sparking change across the industry.

Digital museum content, such as digital exhibitions, online collections, and interactive experiences, is an excellent way to engage visitors and allow them to explore topics in more detail and on their own time. For instance, the National Gallery of Art recently shared that its website traffic has doubled since launching its daily puzzle game Artle in May 2022. By providing a unique, interactive experience, the National Gallery of Art has successfully encouraged more visitors to explore the many collections and programs the museum has to offer.

When analyzing qualitative data, our end goal is always to provide a sense of how much or how little an idea or trend came up within the whole sample. Sometimes, it’s very clear—people either say “yes, I liked this” or “no, I didn’t like this,” and there were no overlapping reasons why. But most of the time, it’s less straightforward and more nuanced. We have to interpret what people say based on many factors.

February is Black History Month. And while the responsibility of acknowledging the often overlooked contributions of Black people and inequities they face is a daily endeavor, February offers us an annual opportunity for organizations (particularly predominantly white ones) to look inward and consider whether they are living up to their anti-racist ideals.

In African American literature, my field of study, citation is pivotal practice—one of call and response. Throughout college and graduate school, my African American literature professors would turn toward us, their students, and pause. After a breath, they would all say something to this effect: “Citation is important. Why? Because you are calling on the ancestors, Black thinkers and leaders, before you. Their voices are often left out of the historical record. In your research, you must not forget the voices you have learned from.” Today, as I approach museum work, I take this lesson with me.

With a majority of TikTok users belonging to Gen Z, the platform can be a great way to pull in younger, diverse audiences that may not be as involved in or aware of museum happenings. Yet, social media moves at a hyper fast pace, with new trends appearing every day and heavily saturated feeds. Understandably, getting started on TikTok may seem daunting.

Most museums have a generalized notion of their audiences. They may broadly refer to “families,” “empty nesters,” “locals,” and “tourists.” But those broad categories tell us very little about what audiences value, care about, and believe in.

Evaluating audiences’ experiences in a museum program, exhibition, or initiative, like most things, requires thoughtfulness and planning to be useful. But, when things get busy and deadlines loom, sometimes the last thing you want to do is slow down and consider why you are doing something.

This article, co-written by three art museum educators and Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) coaches, explores VTS’ potential as an anti-racist teaching tool.

It’s been about a year since the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and Wilkening Consulting published “Museums and Trust 2021.” The report states that museums continue to be regarded as “highly trustworthy.” This statement made me uncomfortable last year and continues to bother me now.

When visiting the Met earlier this year, I was especially interested in the Islamic art exhibitions. As I wandered through, trailing from South Asia to Ottoman Anatolia to Damascus, I was on the one hand in awe of how the Met had such a wide variety of items from these places, but on the other hand, distraught and angered by the objects on display.

The fight for the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) was long, hard, and demanding. Thanks to the incredibly taxing work of disabled activists for decades leading up to the eventual passing of the ADA in 1990, Americans with disabilities have more protections than ever before.

Observations have always been one of my favorite ways to collect data. Watching how people move about and behave in a space is inherently addictive—there is so much you can discover if you pay close attention to what is happening around you, and it feels a bit like going undercover as a spy.

In light of recent posts about museum workers leaving the field (like this one from Seema Rao and this one from Paul Bowers), I’ve been inspired to write about my own recent career transition from museum education to research and consulting. My hope is that these ideas resonate with any museum educator, or really anybody considering work in another field, who feels uncertain about articulating how their skills can transfer to another profession.

While there is often a bias toward quantitative data, numbers aren’t everything. I love the complexity and nuance revealed through qualitative data. Because qualitative data is open-ended, it helps you understand peoples’ thoughts and experiences in their own words–this can reveal interesting, profound, funny, and unexpected insights that would be lost in quantitative methods.

There is a beauty in seeing history that is actively lived in, structures that are actively used rather than sitting behind a glass wall in a museum, tethered away from the lands where they were constructed.

Too often, I see that exhibitions are developed in a way that assumes visitors will experience them like a book. However, results from hundreds of summative exhibition evaluations tells me that visiting an exhibition is more analogous to taking a hike than reading a book. Here are four ways museum visitors experience exhibitions like hikes rather than like books.

Over the last two years, we galvanized around a refreshed approach and believed this should be reflected by a new name and look. We worked with the talented and inspiring women at Wild Awake Creative to develop the Kera Collective identity so that it reflects who we have come to be and what we see for our future.

As we begin 2022, nearly two years since the pandemic began, what I’m most struck by is that the world I operate in is a fundamentally changed one.