User-Centred Exhibition Design: How to Test Ideas with Museum Visitors

User Centred Design (UCD) offers radical opportunities for user-driven exhibitions that fill a genuine need in people’s lives. It is a process that offers opportunity for continuous improvement based on insights from your visitors.

Chances are you’ve heard of UCD before. Designers use it to create intuitive and pleasurable experiences for people using their products. This is called the user experience (UX). It is the result of a series of considered and deliberate choices that are tested, reviewed and amended to meet a user’s needs.

Test early, while changes are still possible

When working with UCD, it’s vital that you test as much as you can. This can be done by specialists or it could be something that you do yourself. Whatever you’re able to do, do it early and do it often. A small early test can reveal problems while there is still time to change the design. The number and mix of participants should fit the question and audience: a few sessions can guide the next iteration, but cannot establish that the exhibition works for everyone. Be realistic about what you can change. It’s likely that you won’t have the resources to fix everything so instead concentrate on those that will make the biggest impact on your visitors.

Choose one question for the first test: can a visitor find the beginning, work out what to do with an interactive, or explain the main idea in their own words? Use a paper label or cardboard mock-up and watch before offering help. Note what happened, agree one change and try it with the next group. Recruit for the audience and access needs you are designing for, and leave time in the programme to act on what you learn.

A five-plane framework for exhibition design

One useful framework is Jesse James Garrett’s five planes of user experience: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface. Applied to exhibitions, they connect the purpose of a visit with the details people encounter. Work can overlap, and a test at one level may send the team back to an earlier decision.

Strategy: agree the purpose with your audience

The strategy plane isn’t interested in the finer details. This is the time for blue sky thinking about your exhibition’s purpose. This is your opportunity to look beyond your institution and shape the exhibition objectives with visitors, alongside the museum’s purpose, collections and practical responsibilities. By asking them what they want your exhibition to achieve, rather than guessing or telling them, you avoid the generic and meaningless objectives we’re all familiar with. Instead, you can create a direction that is relevant and fills a genuine visitor need.

Scope: decide what belongs in the exhibition

The scope plane is all about translating those objectives into a set of features that will satisfy them. They’re important to get written down as they define not only what you are designing but also what you’re not. This helps avoid scope creep but also keeps you focused on what is important – your visitors. Try and make your scope as specific as possible and avoid anything too subjective. This will make it much easier to test and evaluate. Visitors bring expertise in their own experiences and needs. When they suggest a feature, explore the need behind it, then test possible responses against the exhibition’s objectives and constraints.

Structure: test the story and route

The structure plane is the time to think about how to fit your content together in a way that makes sense. It is at this stage in the process that you can try out your key message and text hierarchies. Think of this plane as being like a website. Can the visitors navigate through it to find the information they want? At what points do they begin to lose interest or find ideas difficult to understand? What stories and objects do they remember? These are all invaluable insights that you can use to inform anything from the placement of an object to the need for an interactive to explain things in more detail. One of the great things about UCD is that it encourages you to look beyond yourself for insights and this is especially important in terms of content. A structure that makes sense to you as an expert might not to someone who is coming across it for the first time.

Skeleton: make actions and navigation clear

It’s now time to create the exhibition skeleton. This plane is all about designing the structures that will deliver your content and making sure that they work as you intended. An understanding of affordances and signifiers will really help you get to grips with this plane.

Affordances are the actions made possible by the relationship between a person and an object; they depend on the person’s capabilities as well as the object’s design. For example, a door has the affordance that it can be pushed to allow a user to enter a room. The thing to remember about affordances is that they are not always obvious. That’s why it’s important that they’re signified. This doesn’t have to be a label. A useful signifier makes a possible action apparent to the intended user, so test the cue rather than assuming everybody reads it in the same way. Taking the example of the door again, fitting it with a plate suggests to the user that they should push it, as there is no handle for it to be pulled.

Testing affordances needn’t be expensive and time consuming. For major exhibitions, it is always advisable to build time and budget in to the project for prototyping (especially when prototyping museum interactives). For smaller projects, it’s amazing what insights can be gained from cardboard mock-ups. Interventions around your existing galleries can also be really helpful, especially if you’re trying out new layouts or wayfinding systems in museums.

Surface: test the look and feel

The final phase is the surface plane and deals with the look and feel of your exhibition. This is hugely important as it’s going to be the first thing your visitors notice when they’re making their mind up whether or not to visit your exhibition. Each visitor will come with their own conceptual model of what they’re expecting. It’s your job to find out as much as you can about this and try to match or myth-bust it. For example, you’ve found through your research, that your target audience doesn’t think your museum is their kind of place. Find out what their kind of place is and use your surface plane to echo this. Audience segmentations such as those offered by the Audience Agency can really help in this respect, as these will often include this kind of information as part of their pen profiles.

Following these planes won’t result in the perfect exhibition but chances are you’ll get closer to it. And that’s the point of UCD. Because you are relentlessly testing your ideas and talking to your visitors, you know what’s wrong with your exhibition. It’s a journey that doesn’t end with the exhibition opening, there’s always more to learn and improve.