Rewarding curiosity: How the British Museum shapes the visitor experience

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“Part of our job is to make sure we attract people’s attention, but then, when we get it, we reward it,” says Stuart Frost. As head of interpretation at the British Museum, he is focused on shaping an experience within the 260-year-old organisation that is relevant for visitors today, doesn’t sell the museum short, and helps people connect with what they’re seeing.

“‘Interpretation’ can be defined as anything that helps people make sense of their visit to the museum,” says Frost, and this feeds into all parts of the organisation, including programming, marketing and retail. His specific role within the interpretation team is to develop permanent gallery displays and special exhibitions, and he runs the museum’s team of volunteers, too.

Not only do permanent galleries and special exhibitions attract two entirely different audiences, but people also behave differently in each.

“In special exhibitions, particularly those with an admission charge, it’s predominantly people from London and the South East,” says Frost. Because they have invested time and money to going to see the exhibition, they are highly motivated, committed and keen to get value for money – on average, visitors to a big exhibition will stay for around an hour and a half.

“From an interpretation point of view, you can choreograph the visitor journey – try to create a nice narrative arc that is emotionally engaging, intellectually satisfying and stimulating,” he says.

However, precisely because exhibition visitors are so committed, size becomes a bigger concern; a few too many objects and there’s a risk people will become fatigued. “People will try to read it all and get tired, miss the big dramatic finale and think ‘I just want to go to the shop now’ or ‘I need to sit down’.”

In contrast, the permanent galleries attract a far higher number of international visitors – around 70% of the audience is from overseas – and they stay for far shorter periods of time. “Roughly about the same proportion of people will be first-time visitors – and there are 80 galleries to visit and about 80,000 objects on display. So that’s quite challenging for people to get to grips with.”

With such an established institution, many people have preconceptions of what the British Museum stands for and what types of people visit before they’ve set foot into its impressive domed Great Court. However, a segmentation model developed by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre found that the museum isn’t merely a destination for tourists visiting London from overseas; its seven segmentations cover a variety of visitors, from schoolchildren to those with intellectual motivations.

“Historically, there’s been this perception – and it’s still held by others in the museum sector at conferences – that you open the doors at the British Museum and tourists just come in,” says Frost. While the museum does draw a high volume of international visitors, most of them are not in “classic tourist mode” – the sightseer segment is around 20% of its audience. “It changes the way the institution thinks – it’s more nuanced than that and we need to be more sophisticated about who’s coming and why, and what they’re actually doing while they are here.”

Special exhibitions are not only effective at attracting new visitors, but they also play an important role in challenging assumptions about the museum and gaining diverse audiences. The recent ‘Manga’ show (see ‘A novel approach’ section below) – perhaps not the type of content traditionally associated with the British Museum – is one example.

Frost says: “Exhibitions are very powerful at changing people’s perceptions of museums. With the right programming, and the work that goes on around it to develop links with communities, it’s a really useful tool for showing what the museum can do and what it has to offer.”

For example, an exhibition held at the museum in 2012, ‘Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam’, drew an audience that was 60% black and minority ethnic (BAME) and around 46% Muslim, according to Frost. For comparison, visitors to the previous exhibition were around 96% white.

The museum is in the process of deciding its priorities for the next phase of its public engagement strategy, says Frost, and exhibition programming is a key element. Evaluating which audiences are coming to each exhibition is a core part of this process.

“An exhibition such as Manga is going to attract a very different audience from ‘Troy’, and to have that robust data of who’s gone to that particular show is really valuable,” explains Frost.

“It’s vital that we attract younger people and we develop a programme that diversifies the audience and draws different people in. For anyone who’s involved in public programming, that data is essential.”

Capturing attention

The museum undertakes front-end evaluation around 20 months before an exhibition opens, to test initial reactions to the concept, including what people already know about it and what challenges there might be in making it appealing. This typically takes the form of focus groups or phone interviews conducted by an agency, occasionally followed up with an online survey.

In the research for its forthcoming Troy exhibition, the museum found there was a high level of interest, which created a challenge in itself. “People’s expectations may be shaped by watching a Hollywood film with Brad Pitt and they’re expecting massive walls with rows and rows of soldiers and armour,” says Frost. “The archaeology of Troy was not really like that, so it highlighted the importance of drama, storytelling and immersive design.”

Formative evaluation typically happens 12-14 months before opening. At this stage, provisional design work on the exhibition layout will have been completed and focus groups will go into more detail about what people know and their concerns. At this point, the curator will also usually become involved in the visitor research.

“In a really good exhibition, everyone’s pushing each other and saying ‘we should be aiming higher than that; people should be able to take away more than that’. If everything’s in harmony, hopefully you get the perfect exhibition,” says Frost.

The interpretation team conducts tracking studies to observe how visitors move around the museum and gravitate towards objects and information. In future, Frost would like to experiment with eye-tracking studies for clearer insights into how much people are reading.

The museum has used technology, such as iBeacons, to assess general flow within the museum, but tracking for smaller gallery projects is still done manually. “Most people go to the object first and then they look for the information – and they have questions, such as ‘what is this curious terracotta thing?’ You’ve got to answer the obvious questions before you give them more information on where you want to get them.”

Galleries have traditionally been laid out like books on the wall, with the expectation that people will read the information in a linear fashion. The reality, of course, is different, and today museums know that information must be structured to not only capture people’s attention and hold it, but also to ensure they encounter the bigger ideas and take something of value.

“If people are only stopping at a small number of objects, we need to make sure they’re the ones that will tell the story we want them to leave the gallery with,” says Frost, discussing what the museum calls “key gateway objects”. These must be some of the most important in a collection and be visually pleasing.

Too much information?

How does the British Museum ensure that special exhibitions are informative without being dry, or clear without dumbing down? It uses tone of voice and text guidelines to maintain consistency, but every exhibition is slightly different, Frost says. For instance, a recent exhibition in partnership with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the history of dissent, had a suitably irreverent tone.

The museum has also built a large database from its evaluation, dating back a decade, so it uses this for benchmarks and to inform future work. One of the things it has determined is how ‘wordy’ an exhibition can be: the optimum number is between 10,000 and 14,000 words. In the past, however, it has been as high as 25,000 – a lot for people to read, and something that has been “reflected in the data”, says Frost.

By applying insights in this way, he feels the exhibitions have improved over the years – but, of course, this means people expect more. “Audience expectations have risen and – if you fall short – people notice, and they let you know.”

In a way, Frost’s role is about making the universal personal. “Everyone should be able to come to the museum and find something that connects with them personally.

“It’s such a broad audience – you have people with a depth of interest in one particular area, and someone who’s visiting for their one and only time, and they’ve got two precious hours, and you want to make sure they see as much as they can and that you’re giving them an experience they’ll remember.”

A novel approach

Taking place from 23 May to 26 August 2019, ‘Manga’ – at the British Museum – was the biggest exhibition of manga ever displayed outside of Japan.

The museum worked with TWResearch on qualitative formative research to inform the exhibition’s design, interpretation and marketing.

The research consisted of three focus groups with different audience segments: young British Museum members and Japan ‘enthusiasts’; manga ‘enthusiasts’; and exhibition-goers and parents (belonging to the museum’s ‘self-developer’ and ‘art lover’ segments).

In addition to wanting an exhibition that was dynamic, immersive and experiential, to reflect manga’s energy, most participants wanted the basics to be explained, including how to read it (from back to front) and iconography. This informed the interpretation in the exhibition explaining the use of symbols to communicate sound and movement to the reader.

The most challenging aspect was the wide range of audiences – from passionate fans of manga to “regular British Museum exhibition-goers who knew almost nothing”, says Frost. “From an audience point of view, manga wasn’t something that most visitors associate with the British Museum. We do collect modern and contemporary Japan, and manga, but it isn’t something that the wider public was particularly aware of.”

Morris Hargreaves McIntyre is conducting summative evaluation for the exhibition – data collection began on its first day and was ongoing while this article was being written.

“From younger visitors and people with BAME backgrounds, there is a perception that the British Museum is a traditional organisation – one that is academic, hard work and focused mainly on the ancient world,” says Frost. “The summative evaluation for Manga will show that the exhibition has helped shift this perception for the younger audience it has attracted.”

This article was first published in the October 2019 issue of Impact.