Museum Visitor Experience: Understanding and Connecting with Museum Visitors
Book available late 2020, pre order at Rowman & Littlefield and Amazon, and other book sellers
“A “how-to book” about using user centered design to create inclusive visitor centered museums”
Now all museums can be visitor centered experiences
Museum Visitor Experience: Understanding and Connecting with Museum Visitors, book and online course are the most effective system for creating visitor centered museums. Learn the basics of design thinkinging, user centered design and service design, designed specifically for complete beginners. The book, course and online tools have helped hundreds of people a year just like you, from all over the world, create inclusive visitor centered museum experiences.
Museum Visitor Centered Process:
- Understand Context
- Define Objectives
- Identify Stakeholders and Users
- Empathy for Stakeholders and Users
- Define Problem
- Ideation
- Research
- Prototype
- Test
- Iterate
Museum Visitor Experience: Connecting with Museum Visitors
Museums are changing and the visitor’s expectations of a museum experience are changing.
The Museum Visitor Experience book is a “how-to” book for creating great museum experiences that meet the demands of the new generation of museum visitors. The expectations of the museum visitor are changing from a fixed monolithic institution serving a traditional and known audience to museums as spaces of inclusion and destinations catering to a wide array of individuals who connect with a museum on a instance-by-instance basis rather than buying-in to a long-standing commitment supported by regular attendance.
Museum Visitor Experience: Connecting with Museum Visitors is an all-inclusive guide of actionable exercises and activities that can be put into use today. Including guidance for creating visitor plans that insure excellent museum visitor service. The audience for the Museum Visitor Experience book is anyone interested in deeply connecting with museum audiences; readers include, board members, museum directors, directors of exhibits & education and maybe most importantly managers of museum on-floor staff.
The museum visitor experience extends to include fund-raising, administration and staff hiring as examples. There is no part of a museum that is untouched by the importance of connecting with the visitor. A museum’s mission extends beyond the “what” a museum will accomplish to the “how” a museum will deliver it’s mission. The Museum Visitor Experience: Connecting with Museum Visitors is about the “how” to deliver your mission.
By the end of the book readers will have a new understanding of museum visitors as co-creators and a new understanding of the importance of creating excellent visitor experiences through creating an emotional bond between visitor and the museum. The book also includes this continually updated website museum-visitor.com
Museum Visitor Experience: Understanding and Connecting with Museum Visitors
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Foreword
Part I: SHIFT TO THE VISITOR: THE MUSEUM VISITOR EXPERIENCE (WHY) 1 The Changing Museum Landscape
2 Shifting to the Visitor’s Perspective
3 Changing from Object to Narrative: The Future of the Museum Visitor Experience
4 Design Thinking and Emotional Design: A New Process
5 Customer Experience (CX) Methodologies and the Museum Visitor Experience
6 Applying Customer Experience (CX) Tools to the Museum Visitor Experience
Part II: MUSEUM VISITOR (WHO)
7 Walking in the Visitor’s Shoes: Personas, Diversity, and Possibilities for Behavioral Change 8 The Museum Visitor’s Journey: Pre-Visit, Visit, and Post-Visit
Part III: SUPPORTING THE MUSEUM VISITOR EXPERIENCE (HOW)
9 Starting a Museum
10 Museum Objectives: What Does the Museum Want to Accomplish?
11 Museums as Life-Changing
12 Placemaking: All Museums Are Local
13 Feasibility Studies: Know Thy Community
14 Meeting Museum Visitor Needs: Museum Dashboards and the 360 Museum
15 Other Stakeholders’ Roles in the Museum Visitor Experience
16 Museum Fundraising
Part IV: FUTURE MUSEUM VISITOR EXPERIENCES (WHEN)
17 The Impact of Emerging Technologies on the Museum Visitor Experience
18 The Museum of the Future: Always New, Agile, and Event-Driven
Part V: VISITOR EXPERIENCE TOOLBOX
Glossary of Terms
Bibliography
Index
Mark Walhimer is a part-time industrial design professor and managing partner of Museum Planning, LLC a museum consultancy.
His company specializes in the planning, design, and management of interactive educational experiences. Walhimer started his firm in 1999 to assist start-up and expanding museums with museum master planning, exhibition design, and museum project management. His firm has completed more than 40 projects worldwide for an international clientele that includes science centers, art museums, history museums, libraries, and corporations.
Projects include Museo Interactivo de Economía (MIDE) in Mexico City, “Alcatraz: Life on the Rock,” traveling exhibition and Trans Studio Science Center in Bandung, Indonesia. Prior to starting his company, Walhimer held positions at Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and Liberty Science Center. Walhimer is author of Museums 101, a how-to guide for creating and organizing all varieties of museums.
Walhimer has a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and a master’s degree in industrial design and exhibition design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
