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Article
on Information Design
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models | processes |
Originally published in the first quarter 2001 issue of Technical Communication. Reprinted with permission.
These observations could describe visitors to web sites, none of which are more than ten years old. Actually, these observations describe museum visitors. As a type of institution, the museum has existed for nearly three centuries and these concerns are nothing new to museum exhibit designers. Since the first research in the late 1920s and early 1930s, museum professionals have observed visitor behavior and, in response, transformed exhibit design practices (Chambers, 1999). These practices were further refined in the 1960s to 1980s as museums redefined their mission of museums, from warehouses of artifacts to institutions of informal learning (that is, learning without a pre-determined outcome) (Bloom & Powell, 1984).
I systematically observed current exhibit design practices as part of an extended study. The primary purpose of that study was to see how practices from my primary field of study, instructional design (whose primary focus is on formal learning in classroom, through workbooks, and online) transferred to the design of informal learning in museums. An interpretation of these observations yielded a more flexible perspective on instructional design (Carliner, 1998).
It also yielded a number of communication practices that could be transferred from the community of museum exhibit designers to the community of information designers. Sharing that second set of interpretations is my purpose here. Following a brief description of the research project, I share 8 lessons, or category of practices, that I observed. For each lesson, I first describe in detail what I observed in museums. Immediately afterwards, I suggest how information designers might apply these lessons when working on technical communication products. I close with some broader thoughts about these lessons.
So wondered Judith Stone, writing in a special 1993 issue of Discover that focused on the emotional and educational impact science museums on scientists and science writers.
So did I.
Museums have always fascinated me as some of the most complex and successful forms of scientific and technical communication. Answering the same question as Judith Stone, then transferring the lessons learned back to the professional communities of instructional and information designers, motivated my qualitative study of the design for three permanent exhibitions in history and technology museums, and related background and follow-up research.
The primary purpose of the study was to understand how members of the design team addressed instructional issues as they designed exhibits and see which design practices for formal learning transferred to the design for informal learning in museum exhibits. The exhibits were purposely selected. They included ones on:
In the main study, each member of the "core" design team was interviewed three times. Core team members are ones who play a primary role in designing and developing the exhibit. These team members include:
For each exhibit, members of the peripheral team were also interviewed when feasible. These team members provide specialized skills needed to develop a part of the exhibition. Skills needed on the peripheral team vary among exhibits. Typically, they include a museum educator (whose job is to develop programs geared towards school groups that are related to the content of the exhibit), public programs coordinator (whose job is to develop programs geared towards adults and the general public), registrar (whose job is to oversee the documentation and protection of objects in exhibits), media specialists (including video and interactive specialists), and editor (whose job is to edit the copy for all labels and gallery guides associated with an exhibition). In addition to the interviews, I observed team meetings and reviewed project plans when feasible.
The study followed the grounded theory methodology. A central feature of this methodology is constant comparative analysis. That is, data is constantly analyzed throughout the data collection process to devise theories; data that are collected later are compared to the evolving theory to determine whether they support the theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1994, 273). Strauss and Corbin suggest a three-phase process for analyzing data. The first phase is open coding, which they define as “the process of breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing data.” The next phase is axial coding, "a set of procedures whereby data are put back together in new ways after open coding, by making connections between categories" (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 96). The last phase is selective coding, "the process of selecting the core category, systematically relating it to other categories, validating those relationships, and filling in categories that need further refinement and development (1990, p. 116). When coding, researchers primarily look for dominant patterns: patterns that appear in all sites studied. Researchers also look for weak patterns: ones that occur in at least 2 sites. Researchers try to explain why a weak pattern might not be observed at the other sites.
Besides the core research for this study, I conducted preliminary and follow-up research. This research consisted of a literature review, observations of visitor behavior in a science center in a large city in the United States, visits to over 200 museums in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and participation in two conferences and other events for museum exhibit designers.
Because visits to museums are voluntary in nature, museum staffs must motivate people to visit (Csikzentmihalyi& Hermanson, 1995). First, museum staffs must motivate visitors to enter the building. To do that, they must work past an impression among the public that museums are primarily intended for people from upper economic classes and the majority religious and racial groups (Zolberg, 1994). Such impressions have, in the past, made people from outside of those groups feel unwelcome in museums. This is similar to the challenge faced by businesses that want to sell products and services outside of their countries or to historically marginalized groups like women, African Americans, Latinos, and gays and lesbians.
To address this concern, museums have attempted to broaden their constituencies. This is a policy of the museum profession backed by practices in specific museums. Believing that diversity behind the scenes is essential to representing diversity elsewhere in museums (including xhibits), museums have established formal relationships with constituency groups. For example, the high technology museum in this study has an advisory board of low-income children and the Brooklyn Museum has an outreach project with the surrounding neighborhood. Museums have also made a concerted effort to broaden the socio-economic, gender, and ethnic backgrounds of their staffs and boards (and continue to). (Hirzy, 1992)
These behind-the-scenes changes are reflected in exhibits that have a different type of appeal than in the past. In some instances, exhibits are designed to appeal to the general public. Called "blockbusters," they are temporary exhibits (running from a few months to a year), focus on well-known topics with broad public interest, and are primarily intended to lure in large numbers of visitors (Lee, 1994). One of the first was the 1979 King Tut Exhibit that visited major art museums, and has been followed by blockbusters such as the Monet exhibit that visited the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and the Titanic Exhibit that visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 2000. Museums can see attendance surge by as much as 33 to 50 percent during a blockbuster.
Other exhibits are designed to appeal to targeted constituencies, ones whom museums typically ignored in the past. Some of these exhibits are temporary, like the retrospective of African-American artist Jacob Lawrence at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and one on the contributions of women engineers at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Some exhibits for targeted audiences are permanent, like the First People's galleries in the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Following its most recent renovation, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts devoted half of its permanent gallery space to non-Western art. Previously, it comprised less than a third of the gallery space.
Within these exhibits, staffs design interpretive materials like labels (signs within the exhibit that contain explanatory text) and media presentations. When developing these materials, staffs take into account the diversity of experiences that affect interpretation of an object and want to avoid foisting their own interpretations on the public. Many interpretative materials now describe the outside factors that shape the meaning of an objects and topics on display.
In addition to exhibits, museums also provide related public programs that are targeted to particular communities. Some programs focus on singles, such as the High Museum's Young Professionals, which is geared towards people under the age of 40. Others programs focus on underprivileged youth, such as an after school program sponsored by the Computer Museum.
Although some exhibits and activities are intended to draw targeted audiences, exhibit designers know that the museum is a public place and the entire public must feel welcome in each exhibit. So ultimately, these designers lack a clearly defined audience. In fact, at a meeting of exhibit designers at the 2000 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, one designer asked, "Did anyone target an age group?"
Still, efforts to broaden the appeal of museums have changed public attitudes towards them over time; they're places people increasingly choose to go. In the United States, for example, more people visit museums in a given year than attend professional sports (Ivey, 2000).
Like museum exhibit designers, designers of websites need to appeal to a variety of demographic groups. As businesses increasingly market globally, the literature on technical communication provides substantial guidance in addressing geographically distinct markets for whom information will be translated and localized (Hoft, 1995).
The community of website designers and technical communicators pays less attention to other aspects of cultural difference. For example, the little has been written about the impact of occupational culture and socioeconomic class on technical documents. More significantly, because many believe that technical communication is objective (that is, free from bias), technical communicators are rarely encouraged to identify their own cultural biases and explore how they might affect the communication products that they develop.
The industrial history museum that I studied does not have enough exhibit space to physically display the tens of thousands of hand tools in its collection, much less the other artifacts, like machinery and manufactured goods. Nor did the museum have enough storage space on the premises at the time of this study to store the objects it could not display. The staff stored them in a rented storage space several miles from the museum. The idea implementer explained that museums typically display only 10 percent of their collections at a given time.
Objects form the centerpiece of most museum exhibits. Because of that, and because the primary purpose of museums is educational, museum professionals often refer to their work as object-based learning. One of the most significant choices a museum exhibit design team makes, therefore, is the choice of objects to display. Choices are purposeful. As exhibit designers learned when they would cram entire collections into a series of glass cases and that visitors would ignore, "you have to keep the collection from klummeting [(overwhelming)] your guests." But in choosing which objects are displayed, exhibit design teams also choose which objects remain in storage.
This choice is made in the early stages of design. Because museum exhibits effectively involve a major renovation of a building and therefore require budgets that exceed the costs of most homes, they are funded in two phases. The first is the less expensive planning phase, which is similar to the needs analysis and requirements phase of a technical communication project. If funders have concerns about the plans, the concerns can be resolved before spending large sums of money needed to build the exhibit.
In the planning phase, the idea generator works with a team of content experts and educational specialists to devise a focus for a proposed exhibit. Then, the idea generator and idea implementer work together to develop the detailed plans for the exhibit, called the storyline. The storyline is:
a written document that presents the key elements of the visitor experience. The storyline refines the subject of the exhibition, identifies key topics to be addressed in the exhibition, and discusses possibilities for presentation, including how content in the exhibition might flow and be presented, and the types of objects to be included. Members of the staff who are going to work on the exhibit design team are identified at this time, although only the idea generator and [idea implementer] take the most active roles during this phase. The staff often reviews the museum collection at this point to determine what objects it already has and the objects it might need to collect to effectively realize the exhibition (Carliner, 1998, 84).
In other words, only after the content is chosen do exhibit design teams choose objects. In some cases, several objects might meet the needs of the content so design teams choose objects based on their anticipated appeal to visitors and condition. In some cases, because funds for conserving objects are more plentiful when associated with an exhibit, the design team might choose an object that needs conservation. In other cases, the design team might purposely choose a touch object--that is, one that visitors are encouraged to physically handle. Touch objects must be physically durable.
Some museums have addressed the problem of large collections on an institutional level. Those museums that have comprehensive collections in each topic area addressed by their missions need buildings of immense physical size merely to display and house these collections. Within a given topic area, some collections are sufficiently large that they could comprise museums themselves.
Museums have tried many approaches to shield visitors from this enormity. Some have spawned other museums. For example, the Washington, DC-based Smithsonian Institution has several museums, each focusing on a particular subject area. The London-based Tate Gallery opened a satellite museum to display its modern art collection. The New York-based Guggenheim Museum opened one of its satellites on another continent, in Bilboa, Spain.
Although museums usually have more objects than they can display, many still find themselves short of objects when planning new exhibits. For example, each of the museums that I studied lacked objects in their collections needed in the exhibits studied. In two of the exhibits, new acquisitions represented over 50 percent of the objects ultimately displayed. In each exhibit, too, designers used fabricated objects (that is, built for the exhibit rather than a true historical artifact). Some objects were fabricated because the designers wanted visitors to be able to touch them and real ones would fall apart under such wear. Other objects were fabricated because real ones did not exist.
Similarly, entire museums have opened with signature buildings and without extensive collections to support them. Building collections is proving difficult for these museums. For example, the core collections for many natural history museums opened at the beginning of the twentieth century are specimens of large animals collected on hunts in wilderness areas. Killing endangered species of animals for display in museums is no longer an acceptable practice. Similarly, as prices for art skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s, many art museums that have large acquisitions budgets still do not have enough money to purchase pieces for their collections.
As museums have learned to focus exhibits and limit the amount of information to which they expose visitors, so designers of websites must learn to focus their content and limit the amount of information to which they expose users.
With computer storage easily available and increasingly sophisticated search mechanisms, communicators have little technical incentive to limit information. Furthermore, with the promise of ready access to all of the knowledge in the world through the World Wide Web, some communicators understandably feel a ethical commitment to provide full access to information that the user has a need to know. That technical communicators have always been committed to completeness only strengthens this commitment.
But our values and technology conflict with users' needs and experiences. Consider the following:
Technology, alone, then does not solve the problem of "klummeting users" with information; only design practice does. One tool in controlling information is behavioral objectives (also called learning objectives). Objectives state what users should be able to do after completing a tutorial. Instructional designers develop objectives before starting work on a tutorial and use them to focus their work. They only include content that directly supports the objectives. Other content is discarded (or, if it must be incorporated, results in a changed scope for the project) (Mager, 1997).
When the design was driven by subject matter experts called curators, the heart of most exhibits was a series of cases crammed with artifacts (such as paintings, furniture, textiles, photographs, and documents) and accompanied by detailed documentation on each object (usually typewritten). This dense documentation was primarily prepared by one scholar for use by other scholars.
This reference-like approach to displaying objects created a barrier between museums and the public. The public was overwhelmed with the quantity of objects and the technical language and detail of the documentation. In fact, studies indicated that few visitors actually read labels and, of those who do, most spend less than half a minute doing so. When museums started broadening their audiences two decades ago, they realized that:
[the] museums of past [would have to] be set aside, reconstructed, and transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts (La Follette, 1983, p.41).
In response, exhibit designers transformed their approach to design, using four concepts to guide them in their efforts.
Guiding Design Concept A. Immersion. The first guiding concept is immersion. According to the idea generator at the urban history museum, a museum exhibition should immerse visitors in its story. She noted that a nearby zoo uses this immersion theory of exhibit design. The zoo’s designers “put people where the animals are and let [visitors] become a part of the experiment.” She applies these beliefs and theories to all of the exhibits at her museum. “It’s theater,” she noted, “yet the objects are real, just as animals are real [in the zoo].” In her exhibit, visitors are immersed in the city at four periods in time: an open field from the time preceding settlement, a city street from the late nineteenth century, another city street from the early twentieth century, and a highway scene from the late twentieth century. The designers of the two other exhibits studied also used immersion.
Guiding Design Concept B. Themes. The second guiding concept is dividing complex topics into a limited number of key themes. A designer participating in the exhibit brainstorming session at the 2000 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting called this "modularity." Because topics for exhibitions are often broad and the number of facts presented is more than a visitor can process in the short time of a typical visit, designers try to identify a limited number of broad points on which to focus, and build exhibits around these key themes. Each of the exhibits that I studied had less than 5 themes. By limiting the number of themes, designers hope to increase the likelihood that visitors will better recall the insights from exhibits.
For example, designers focused on four key themes in the development of the city featured in the exhibit studied at the urban history museum rather present a timeline of development. These four themes corresponded to four distinct phases of the city's development, and the design team built four galleries, each immersing visitors in a phase of the city's development.
Guiding Concept C. Layering. The third guiding concept is that of layering content. The idea generator at the urban history museum explained it best. She insisted that an exhibit is not "a book on a wall." In other words, visitors should not have to read all of the labels to learn about the topic of the exhibit. Instead, they should be able to explore in as much detail as they like and leave feeling as if they learned a complete topic.
She designed her exhibit so that labels--text signs on the wall that provide explanatory information--are presented in three levels of depth. Visitors can look at the label and identify its tier, and read all of the labels in a chosen tier see a complete story. These tiers included:
Guiding Concept D. Skimmability. The fourth guiding concept is skimmability. Because visitors come from all ages and educational and professional backgrounds, designers cannot assume they know the technical language associated with the subject matter of the exhibit. In addition, because visitors are usually standing on their feet when they read the labels, reading labels can quickly become an uncomfortable experience. Finally, most visitors usually have a limited amount of time, either because they have other activities scheduled, want to leave time to see other parts of the museum or are visiting with an impatient friend or relative. Therefore, designers must write the labels to be skimmed while standing, rather than studied while sitting.
As the designers of early television quickly realized that a television show was not a radio show with pictures, so designers of web sites are learning that readers do not prefer to read long passages of text on a computer screen (talk of electronically distributed books not withstanding). (Marsh, 1997) In fact, some studies show that users do not read online, they skim. Users don't skim everything, merely the first few lines on a screen. In those instances where they do read word-for-word, users typically read slower online than they do in a book (Horton, 1995).
As objects distinguish museum exhibits from books, and pictures distinguish television from radio, so the ability to interact and the ability to integrate several media distinguish computers from books and other types of media. Many of the design techniques used to control the flow of data in a museum exhibit also work online:
As exhibit designers design skimmable exhibits, so website designers present content in a scannable mode, using such devices as navigational tools, headings, lists, charts, and graphics to promote scanning (Carliner, 2000).
The designer of the exhibit on computer and telecommunications networks at the high technology museum commented that visitors should have the “realization that what [they]’re experiencing is unique, powerful, and challenging." A good exhibition “keeps [visitors] coming around the corner" and "makes [them] want to explore.”
Exhibit designers are keenly aware that the physical location of objects within an exhibit has a significant impact on visitors' experiences and try to consciously use that space.
Conscious use starts with the general layout of the exhibit. Some designers like to create a hub of activity, such as the designer of the exhibit on networks:
I wanted big circle in the center, as if the exhibit radiated from a hub. I like to start with larger metaphor . . . Even if people don’t realize it, the exhibit has strength of that organization. It makes everything flow naturally, according to a plan. Otherwise, it’s just a space layout...Whether people understand or not, they know something’s there for a reason...[Visitors] should always see hub. That’s how it is on the network.
The concept evolved from my work in retail. The [bookstores I designed] have a book layout, with pages on either side [of a central aisle]. Nobody thinks about it but it’s an organization method that, at the least, makes sense.
Others prefer a layout that lets visitors enter from any point. That's what the idea generator at the urban history museum prefers. Rather than following a timeline, she wanted to make it possible for visitors to enter the exhibit at any point in time and coherently follow the story forward or backward from that point.
Sometimes a controlled approach is necessary. Because sequence is integral to telling the story of the canning factory, designers planned it to be followed in a specific sequence, with definite starting, middle, and ending points. Some museums use the sequential approach as a means of controlling crowds. For example, the temporary galleries in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Minneapolis Institute of Arts are intended to be followed in sequence because it is the only way to manage the large crowds in blockbuster exhibits and because these exhibits are separately ticketed, requiring a single entrance.
Walls also become design elements. For example, the designers at the urban history museum used flooring that would simulate a sidewalk in one gallery and a highway in another. The designer of the exhibit on networks chose a mesh wall covering to enhance the high tech mood and image of the exhibit.
Raising or lowering the level of light in a gallery also helps create the mood of an exhibit. For example, lighting in the galleries of street scenes in the urban history museum have a high lighting level to simulate daytime light. Sometimes lighting levels are dictated by practical considerations. Because fragile textiles, books, sketches, and paintings fade in bright light, exhibit design teams must often lower light levels to preserve them.
Idea generators and idea implementers also become involved in the design of floor space, too. They choose signature objects to catch visitors' attention and beckon them forward in an exhibit. Signature objects are large objects placed in one section of an exhibit and that can be seen from another. For example, a fire engine in the urban history museum and an Egyptian Temple (complete, and inside the gallery) in the Metrpolitan Museum of Art are examples of signature objects.
Similarly, museum educators become involved in the design of floor space. The educator at the urban history museum noted that she always has to remind the design team to leave a "gathering space" in exhibits she has a place where she can speak to a group of 20 to 40 students at a time.
Laws in some jurisdictions require that exhibits be accessible to all visitors, regardless of their physical disabilities. For example, to accommodate visitors in wheel chairs, exhibit designers typically add ramps to exhibits that have sunken or raised areas, make sure that visitors in wheelchairs have sufficient clearance between objects and that they can read labels from their sitting positions. Although not required by law, many exhibit designers also include seating areas in exhibits because older adults and young children need a place to rest in the middle of an exhibit. The design team at the urban history museum also tested its exhibit with people in wheelchairs to make sure that the accommodations met the needs of these visitors.
Fixed architectural elements also affect the design of the floor space. For example, one of the obstacles facing the design team at the high technology museum was a stairwell in the middle of the exhibit (and the stairs were not part of the exhibit). It could not be moved, so designers had to figure a way of incorporating it into the exhibit.
In addition to considering the floor space of the exhibit, designers also consider traffic patterns in the museum building. Some staffs place popular temporary exhibits at the end of a hallway, subtly requiring that visitors walk by permanent exhibits they might otherwise miss. Architect Richard Meier designed the High Museum of Art in Atlanta so that visitors could see nearly all of the exhibits from the atrium at the entrance. Based on this initial scan, visitors can decide where to begin exploring.
Despite research into the traffic patterns of visitors in museums, not all museum buildings are easily traversed. Some museums try to compensate for a non-intuitive floor plan with extra signage. But as one exhibit designer noted in the brainstorming session of museum exhibit designers "even the best signage can't fix a poorly designed museum." Another commented that wayfinding within a museum has "little to with signs and maps. [It] has to do with layout of the building."
As museum exhibit designers have learned that physical space is a key communication resource, so website designers have learned that screen real estate is a key communication resource. Consider:
From this, web designers might transfer the following into practice:
Consider traffic patterns. On the one hand, designers want to make sure that visitors notice the most important information or sought-after information on the website. However, as museum designers place less-known exhibits in the path of the sought-after ones to give those less-known parts more exposure, so website designers might place less-known content ahead of the better known material as a means of introducing visitors to other parts.
The idea generators at each museum studied all agreed: at the heart of a good museum exhibit is a good story. Like stories in books or film,
museum exhibits must capture the visitor’s curiosity...Our attention is attracted by novel or unexplained stimuli¾a loud noise, a sudden bustling activity, a strange animal, or a mysterious object. It is by appealing to this universal propensity that museums can attract the psychic energy of a visitor long enough so that a more extensive interaction, perhaps leaning to learning, can later take place (Csikzentmihalyi & Hermanson, 1995, pp. 36-37).
The recipe for successful storytelling in exhibits is the same as that in literature: riveting plots and engaging characters.
To create riveting plots, museum exhibit designers employ a number of standard storytelling techniques. One of the most basic is making sure the exhibit has a distinct beginning, middle, and ending. For example, the exhibit on networks begins with a two-part opening: a video overview, followed a room where visitors received an "identity card." Visitors use the card to choose one of four virtual tour guides to lead them through the exhibit (seen by visitors on interactive display terminals); the computer records the choice on the identity card and so visitors see related material at each guide station in the exhibit. The middle of the exhibit is a sequence of galleries, each of which describes a different type of network. The exhibit ends with another two-part sequence: a gallery presenting the negative side of networks, followed by a room where users can connect to the Internet.
Within the exhibit, exhibit designers use common storytelling techniques such as immersion, juxtaposition, repetition, and subliminal messages to engage the visitor. In addition to serving as a guiding principle of content development described earlier, immersion also serves as a storytelling technique, much like establishing shots in film and description in novels. It physically places visitors in the environment of the objects. For example, Scandinavian Heritage Museum in Seattle tells the story of immigration from Scandinavia to the United States by literally guiding visitors through a sequence of scenes depicting the journey. Visitors see such scenes as rural poverty in the Old Country, a crowded ship carrying immigrants, and homes in the New Country. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts recreates period rooms from Charleston, Paris, and London to depict furniture styles of the past. Exhibit designers believe that experiencing the subject through immersion is so essential to the success of an exhibit that they include it in grant proposals to persuade funders to support the exhibit.
Even a seemingly minor detail contributes to the authenticity of the immersion environment. For example, the walls in each gallery of “Without Boundaries” were painted specific colors to enhance the authenticity. Green walls in the first gallery provide a pastoral feeling, typical of a newly settled rural area, while gray walls in the gallery depicting the commercial growth of the city evoke a business-like mood. Sometimes, the building itself creates authenticity. The industrial history museum is housed in a former canning factory. In addition to adding authenticity, this history actually inspired the subject of the exhibition.
Another storytelling technique is juxtaposition, in which two opposing images or concepts are positioned near one another so visitors can make the contrast. The designers of the exhibit on the history of the city juxtaposed the clothing of early European settlers with that of Native Americans, so viewers would sense the culture clash that would define the early history of the region. Later in the exhibit, the designers recreated a street with scenes from white culture on one side and African-American on the other, to show their separate histories in the community. An activity that takes place within the exhibit on the canning factory juxtaposes managers and workers in the same work environment.
With repetition, an image or concept appears more than once in an exhibit to reinforce a point. Exhibit design teams purposely repeat points to increase the likelihood that visitors will remember it. For example, clothing typical of an era was included in each gallery of the exhibit on the history of the city in the urban history museum to emphasize the importance of clothing as a cultural statement in each period of the city's development.
Exhibit designers also include subliminal messages, ones they hope make an unconscious impact on visitors. Three stones in the first gallery of the exhibit on the history of the city in the urban history museum each represented a different phase in the early growth of the city. Designers do not expect most visitors to recognize the purposes of these stones at all. In fact, designers at each museum studied did not expect visitors to understand their subliminal messages, but the idea generator at the urban history museum said that some visitors tell her that they do get these messages.
In addition to a tightly crafted plot, a good story must be populated by engaging characters. Exhibit designers address this issue, too, in their exhibits. Each of the three exhibitions studied included key characters. In two of the museums studied, the characters were fictional but emerged from extensive research and were composites of real people. For example, the virtual guides through the exhibit on networks were intended to represent different segments of the local population. One was a homeless person. Research with the homeless population helped exhibit designers flesh out this character. Similarly, the designers of the exhibit on the canning factory included descriptions of workers and managers. Although the names were fictional, their life stories were based on information in the museum archives.
As stories are about people, so they must appeal to people. Therefore, the gauge for assessing planned storytelling techniques is their anticipated appeal to visitors.
“The link between the museum and the visitor’s life needs to be made clear...the objects one fiends and the experiences one enjoys, while possibly inspiring awe and a sense of discover, should not feel disconnected from the visitor’s experience (Csikzentmihalyi & Hermanson, 1995, p. 37).
At the most basic, museum exhibit design teams try to appeal to everyday and today. For example, a living room in the exhibit on networks showed how networks affect home life. The last activity in the exhibit on the canning factory gives visitors an opportunity to relate work of the late nineteenth century to work today.
Although exhibit designers make liberal use of storytelling techniques, they sometimes have difficulty finding the human story in the otherwise academic topic of a proposed exhibit. "What's your story? [Sometimes, it's] really hard to get it out to visitors,"commented an exhibit designer attending a meeting of her colleagues at the 2000 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting.
In contrast, another designer commented that she is "more interested in the voices and stories than the technical aspects of the exhibit." She admitted that the technical aspects are essential in the practical challenge of bringing the story to the public.
As exhibit designers rely on storytelling techniques to engage visitors in the content of exhibits, so website designers are relying on storytelling techniques both to engage visitors and as a planning tool.
Here are some of the ways that website designers use storytelling techniques as a planning tool.
In addition, designers can also employ many of the same storytelling techniques used in museum exhibits in websites. For example, as exhibit designers "immerse" visitors in a setting, so website designers simulate experiences. The technique is widely touted in games and online learning. For example, the game SimCity (admittedly, not yet on the web) immerses visitors in the development of a city. A web-based developed for internal use by marketing representatives at Dell Computer mimics a virtual pet, but instead of participants following the life of an animal, it follows the day of a marketing representative (Hartley, 2000).
Similarly, as exhibit designers try to create a mood for their website, so can web designers. For example, a graduate student who was visiting a cybercafe in Manhattan (New York) commented on the way that the designer of the home pages used in this café re-created the Gotham mood online:
I sat in the cool air [as] I waited for the default homepage to load, I noticed that a designer did a wicked cool thing with the interface. As the grey letters emerged from the black background, the designer played a movie in the background. Cars, people, and trucks passed by. The sound was cool, too, and when a horn sounded I jumped! The sound didn't come from the speakers! I watched the reflection of real life--a busy Manhattan street--in my screen!
As it works as a storytelling technique in exhibits, so juxtaposition is an effective storytelling technique online. On some websites, designers visually juxtapose contrasting content. For example, on vote.com, designers present a series of issues. Beneath a value statement, designers place the description of the "for" position on the left and the "against" position on the right. Similarly, following a news story, CNN lists websites with related content, letting visitors surf to sites representing opposite points of view.
Subliminal and subtle messages are also an important part of websites. They tend to show up more in design efforts helmed by graphic designers and artists than by those led by usability experts, who tend to take a more utilitarian approach to design (Every, 1999).
"The first thing we're looking for is people to say, 'Wow!'" commented the director of the then-new Futures Center at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (Behr, 1989). He's not alone. When reviewing the designs for a proposed exhibit at at the high technology museum, the museum educator asked her colleagues, "Where's the fun factor?" Almost universally, the designers of museum exhibits hope their visitors have a pleasant experience.
Part of this interest stems from a genuine desire of the design team to share their passion for a subject with visitors. For example, the idea generator for the industrial history museum wants to help visitors understand their ancestors' experience at work. "[They] spent more than a third of their lives at work, the museum fills a large void in people's understanding of the past." The director of public programs at the urban history museum wants her visitors to "enjoy the experience" and leave exhibits “knowing, thinking, and feeling.”
In some cases, the need to "wow" visitors emerges from more practical considerations. According to one exhibit designer, museums must compete for visitors with other "cool stuff," including other museums, movies, theme parks, performing arts, and sporting events (Mintz, 1994, Zolberg, 1994). Some of these competitors are becoming more like museums. For example, theme parks such as EPCOT in Orlando, Florida and the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada are displaying and interpreting objects, as museums do but with larger budgets and more lavish presentations. This competition raises visitor expectations of effective exhibits (Mintz, 1994, p. 33). In other instances, museums compete with other types of entertainment, such as movies, theatrical and musical performances, and sports as a leisure destination.
Exhibit designers choose topics with strong popular interest not only to broaden their audiences, but also to attract visitors.For example, because many young children have a fascination with dinosaurs, most science and natural history museums regularly schedule dinosaur-theme exhibits. When possible, they have dinosaur skeletons and eggs in their permanent collections, as do the American Museum of Natural History and The Los Angeles County of Natural History. Well-known artists (especially Impressionists) are similarly popular attractions for art museums.
Well-known objects can also attract visitors. People visit the Art Institute of Chicago to see the painting "American Gothic," the British Library in London to see the original draft of the Magna Carta," the Israel Museum to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology to see the collection of gowns worn by the First Ladies to the balls celebrating the inaugurations of their husbands as U.S. presidents. The idea generator at the urban history museum noted that objects are powerful teachers because
[they] hold their own experiences. People ask 'Is this real?' If it weren't, it wouldn't be here."
An object in a temporary exhibit can have a similar drawing power. A pre-opening furor raised by the mayor of New York City over a painting of the Virgin Mary composed, in part, of elephant dung lured visitors to SENSATION: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.
The need to wow visitors continues after they arrive in the exhibit; designers must maintain visitors' interest. The signature objects mentioned earlier serve such a purpose. Sensory experiences, like the simulated earthquake at the California ScienCenter in Los Angeles, are intended to engage senses other than the sight. Though admittedly more sedate, some museums create a multi-sensory experience through music or continuous playing of recorded environmental sounds in the exhibit area. For example, the urban history museum plays recordings of ambient sounds in the exhibit.
Some exhibit designers try to create an emotional reaction among visitors. For example, the urban history museum displayed a robe from a Ku Klux Klan member. A dark gallery with metallic accents in the exhibit on computer networks at the high technology museum was intended to create a "big brother is looking at you" feeling.
Exhibit designers try to transport visitors to other times and places. The exhibit on the canning factory in the industrial history museum recreates the world of work in the late nineteenth century. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England recreates scenes from the journeys of British explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In its Travelling the Pacific exhibit, the Field Museum of Natural History recreates a market in the Phillipines.
But the technique that seems to create the strongest feeling of wow among visitors are interactive ones. The Exploratorium, a science center in San Francisco, pioneered the interactive exhibit. At that museum, visitors perform mini-experiments to discover scientific principles, then might read the explanatory material to learn more about them (Hein, 1990).
Another interactive technique is the touch objects mentioned earlier (that is, objects visitors can touch). Museum exhibit designers believe that one of the most powerful learning experiences in museums occurs when visitors can touch real objects and try to provide this experience whenever possible. In some instances, it is not. Contact with oil from human hands, for example, can damage fragile artwork. Climatic conditions can destroy documents. Light fades fabrics. Visitors sometimes damage objects. Some cause physical harm, though not always intentionally. A visitor to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts thought a chair in one of the galleries was intended for weary visitors. When it broke after he sat on it, he learned that the chair was actually a delicate Chinese antique. But in cases where the potential for damage is slight, or the museum has a duplicate of the object, they like to place it on display.
The public programs and education staffs can enhance the sense of wow in an exhibit. Public programs are those aimed at the general public. Sometimes, the programs are craftspeople demonstrating a type of type or craft on display. For example, the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts scheduled demonstrations by carpenters and blacksmiths to complement its exhibit of tools. Science museums often schedule demonstrations. For example, SciTrek, the Science and Technology Museum of Atlanta, schedules several demonstrations each day.
The education staff focuses almost exclusively on school groups visiting the museum. According to the museum educator at the urban history museum, her colleagues typically develop scavenger hunts and activity baskets as tools to help young visitors notice all parts of an exhibit or focus on parts of special interests to their teachers (if the students attend with a school group). The idea implementer at the industrial history museum added that she also develops materials that classroom teachers can use to prepare students for an upcoming visit and debrief the visit afterwards.
As exhibit designers try to "wow" visitors with provocative subjects, interactivity, and similar techniques, so must website designers. One particular area of interest to website designers is the design of the interaction between users and the computer. Website designers try to "wow" users in a number of way.
Two challenges face designers in bringing "wow" to their websites. The first pertains to technology. With each technical development often comes a new means of "wowing" users. But the challenge to websites designers is finding techniques that engage users within the context of the website content, rather than as a mere demonstration of the technology. Furthermore, the same technologies that let websites develop and enhance profiles of users also involve an invasion of user privacy. Website designers must determine at what point the value of better knowing users exceeds the risk of offending users by collecting and using information that users might now want anyone to be collecting. European law severely limits such practices. In contrast, American Internet users have shown a surprisingly high tolerance to tracking.
The second challenge facing designers in bringing "wow" to their websites comes from the almost "religious" battle between usability experts and graphic designers on ideal approaches to web design. Usability experts, led by the likes of Jakob Nielsen, tend to focus on observable, measurable patterns of effectiveness that can be independently verified through usability research. But measuring affective responses like "wow" taxes even the best refined research methodologies, and graphic designers and others with backgrounds in the arts and humanities are often hard pressed to produce data from universal research that would support the use of non-standard approaches, like those of storytelling.
Two thirds of the way up the back wall of the entrance lobby to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is a horizontal line of lights that lead around a curve and beckon visitors through a hidden doorway. Beyond the doorway is a long, low, dark theater with built-in benches. On the three oversized screens at the front of this theater, a slide and sound show continuously plays. It introduces visitors to the primary temporary exhibit. When visitors leave the theater, they walk up a half a flight of stairs and enter the exhibit.
Visitors need no beckoning lights to see the "[city] in your face" video in the city history exhibit at the urban history museum. It simultaneously plays on twelve differently-sized monitors hanging from the ceiling at the entrance to the exhibit. A glass wall behind the monitors gives visitors a glimpse into each of the four galleries; visitors can enter any gallery they choose.
At the end of a visit to the exhibit on the canning factory, visitors participate in a computer-based survey that asks them about the types of jobs they saw in the exhibit and helps them relate that to jobs in today's economy that might interest them.
As exhibit design teams at the Walker Art Center, urban history museum, and industrial history museum have done, so exhibit design teams at many museums are integrating media into their exhibits. In some instances, media presentations are as central to an exhibit as the objects. For example, in addition to the "in your face" video, the exhibit at the urban history museum includes three video theaters. The theaters are placed between pairs of galleries and are used to explained the transition from the time covered by the first to the time covered by the second. The videos playing there were created from photos and film footage in the museum archives. The idea generator explained that these videos provided an efficient means of telling the stories of these transitions; stories that the museum had neither the objects nor the gallery space to tell.
Other museums use computers in the exhibit area to provide visitors with access to additional information. For example, the Minnesota Historical Society has included some of the oral histories in its collection on a computer in the exhibit, "Minnesota A to Z," so visitors have access to life stories of local citizens while learning about Minnesota culture. On interactive stations placed in education rooms near the galleries, the Seattle Art Museum provides an additional level of documentation on objects from its permanent collection, and links users to background and related material.
The Internet is becoming increasingly important to exhibits, too. Some web sites serve as online brochures for exhibits, such as the Wing Keye Museum in Seattle. Some websites extend the visit by providing information that visitors might explore in advance and other information they might explore afterwards, such as the information accompanying the Field Museum of Natural History's permanent collection. Some websites serve as exhibits in their own right, either displaying digital versions of materials that are no longer on display or separate displays that are only available online, such as the Museum of Modern Art's Art Safari.
Although videos and computer displays can extend an exhibit, each of the exhibit design teams studied expressed frustration in working with media. New technology, inexperience, and significant under-budgeting plagued the development of the virtual tour guides for the exhibit on networks at the high technology museum. Programming bugs plagued some of the computer displays in the exhibit on the canning factory. What frustrated exhibit designers most, however, was that the program was written with proprietary software and was not documented. So when the company that wrote the program went bankrupt and the programmers literally left the country, the $10,000 station (about 5 percent of the exhibit budget) was unusable. Information on another computer was still usable, but the content was out of date and the staff did not have funds to revise the content.
Other than at the high technology museum, video production went smoothly for the museums studied. But exhibit designers wondered whether visitors actually watched the videos. My observation of visitors to a science center suggests not. The center had several video stations within its exhibit space. Each played video on demand; that is, a video would play after a visitor presses a start button. Few visitors stopped at the videos.
Perhaps they were concerned about the noise from the video calling attention to themselves in the otherwise quiet space. Such sound bleed (that is, sound that can be heard outside its display area) is a practical issue in using video and other audio tools. Because many visitors like to read labels or think as they ponder an exhibit, museums are typically quiet places. Loud sounds from a video within the exhibit could break their concentration. Worse, should sounds in one gallery "bleed" (that is, be heard) in the next, the sound sounds like a non-sequiter and reflects poorly on the designers.
As in museum exhibits, video, audio, and specialized software can provide significant value to a web site. But using them can also create substantial practical challenges.
Finally, as computing increasingly moves off of desktop and laptop computers and onto other types of devices like mobile phones and personal digital assistants, designs for one type of display increasingly will fail to effectively show on the users equipment.
One of the most challenging aspects of exhibit design is assessing its effect on visitors. One common measure used by museums is attendance. In most instances, because most museum admissions let visitors see any exhibit, attendance figures primarily pertain to the museum in its entirety. In these cases, attendance spikes (that is, sudden increases in attendance) are usually attributed to changes in the make-up of exhibits. For example, a spike that follows the opening of a new permanent exhibit is attributed to that exhibit. In some instances, however, museums separately charge. They usually do so for blockbuster temporary exhibits or exhibits located in another facility. In those cases, attendance figures pertain to the separately charged exhibit.
"Wouldn’t it be better to judge an exhibition’s success-or failure-by attendance figures?" asks Chambers. No, she determines, observing that "attendance figures measure marketing strategies, not exhibition strengths" (p.31).
According to the American Association of Museums' Standards for Museum Exhibitions, one is successful if it is physically, intellectually, and emotionally satisfying to visitors. Visitor research is a discipline within the field of museum studies that assesses the impact of exhibitions and their components. Visitor research explores a variety of issues, such as the demographics of visitors to particular types of museums (like science museums), the amount of time visitors spend reading labels, the objects that visitors focus on, the themes that visitors recall from exhibits, and which exhibits visitors actually go through and which ones they ignore. Chambers notes that it is:
significant that museum exhibitions began to be a topic for professional discussion just when American advertising was developing into a science. Research into the power of advertising design to attract and hold attention (to sell a product) soon spilled over into the museum world and created new criteria for visual presentations and their power of persuasion. Early visitor studies of the 1930s took their cue from psychological studies about the manipulative techniques of advertising, as many of them still do (1999, p.33).
Most of these studies are quantitative and results are used as much to generate design guidelines as to assess effectiveness.
Although they value it in theory, few museums actually have the resources to perform their own visitor research. Certainly the museums in this study did not. Other than attendance figures and evaluations from public programs, the design teams in my study relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence to assess the effectiveness of their work. The designers at the high technology museum were the most rigorous, using a form of usability test to assess the effectiveness of proposed exhibits. They would place prototypes of interactive displays in a gallery and observe visitors' interactions with them. In some cases, staff members would also interview visitors to get more specific feedback. They did not apply such rigor to assess the effectiveness of a completed exhibit, relying primarily on comments from feedback forms placed at the end of the exhibit and comments relayed by docents working in the exhibit.
The staff at the urban history placed a comment book at the end of its exhibit on the history of the city. Once a month, the idea implementer would record comments from the book and share them with the rest of the exhibit design team. Sometimes, visitors to that museum would contact the staff. The exhibit design team generally considered itself to be successful when they received requests from visitors for more information or the opportunity to visit the museum library.
Other museums tried more rigorous approaches. The National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland commissioned a study to assess the long-term impact of an exhibition on visitors. According to Adelman, they wanted to see whether or not the exhibit had a transformative effect on visitors (2000). Paris noted that transformation results from a combination of process and outcomes that are neither well-understood nor documented (2000). The researchers noted that long time frame and high cost of this study are expensive; few museums can maintain such evaluation programs on an ongoing basis.
Because we can easily do so, it is tempting to report the number of visitors as the measure of effectiveness of a website. We even have technology that tells us where visitors come from and where the go afterwards. But as counting attendance to museum exhibits only measures marketing strategies, so counting the number of visitors only measures marketing strategies.
Another tempting measure might be measures of system performance (such as the speed of loading) or checklists of usability items (such as the number of links per page or the extensiveness of passive voice). But these characteristics are only correlated with usability; they do not guarantee either usability or users' ability to perform the tasks for which the website was designed.
Only when users can perform the tasks for which a website is intended is the website successful. If the website was designed with clear objectives, then one key measurement of effectiveness is whether users could achieve those objectives. To ensure the long-term success of the website, however, it is important to also gauge user satisfaction with the site. If users are not satisfied with the experience of using the website, they are not likely to use it in the future.
Even with the creation of immersive environments, exhibit designers recognize that exhibits are, at best, only artificial environments. A room that's been rebuilt inside a museum exhibit is no longer part of a real house. Fire alarms from the 1890s that sit on walls in the exhibits on urban history and networks are no longer working nor are they in their original cities. Exhibit designers acknowledge that one of their main tasks is to give visitors tools to better understand the outside world; not replace it.
Although we recognize that we are creating online communities with our websites and especially when we provide opportunities for users to interact with one another online, we, too, must recognize that online worlds are ultimately artificial ones and that people still need direct ongoing contact with one another to learn and work.
I learned this, too, in my work. Although my primary interest was design techniques, what struck me most was the cohesiveness of design teams in this study. In each museum, I observed that the idea generator served as more than the nexus of ideas; this person also served as an informal educator of the team. The idea generator and, in some instances, the idea implementer, were the only ones who had personally learned exhibit design for museums. Other team members relied on the idea generator for guiding concepts of design, and terms introduced by the idea generator were used by all members of the design team. For example, the idea generators at the urban and industrial history museums used the term immersion as did their staffs. The idea generator at the high technology museum used the term immersive, as did his staff.
Similarly, rather than learn about museum studies, exhibit designers in my study often look to other design disciplines for ideas. For example, the designer at the high technology museum relies on his retail experience for ideas.
The enduring lesson that website designers can learn from this is the responsibility we take with our roles. Not only do we design websites for users, but we also provide intellectual and emotional leadership for our entire design teams.
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