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Delivering the Visitor Experience Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2023
To truly understand the visitor's museum experience, it must be seen as a whole.
(Falk and Dierking, 2016, 174)Having recruited and trained up your dream team, it's time to turn our attention to the rest of the visitor experience.
Creating a new experience is unlikely to be a solo effort; in museums we work in collaboration to design and deliver every step of the visitor journey. In these early discussions, it's really important to centre the visitor in all decision making. In this chapter, we’ll explore one of the best tools we have to do this: the visitor journey map.
Why create a visitor journey map?
Most Visitor Experience professionals will be familiar with the concept of a visitor journey map, and for good reason. It's important for all of us, no matter how big or small our organisation, and regardless of our role within the museum, to take a step back and understand the visitor experience from an outside point of view. Of course, this shouldn't be something that happens just at the start of developing a new experience, so even if you’ve done this exercise before, it's worth revisiting. Museums are like eco-systems: the smallest change somewhere in the organisation can have a knock-on impact on the visitor offer, and it's good practice to anticipate this before it negatively affects the visitor.
If you haven't been through this process before, it's a simple enough exercise to carry out. Creating a visitor journey map just means sitting down to plan out the touchpoints of your visitor offer, thinking about what you want your visitors to experience at these touchpoints, and then seeing where the gaps in service are. To do this, you’ll need two important tools: a clear vision of how you want your visitor experience to look and feel; and an objective sense of what the current reality is (you can find out more about this in Chapter 12, ‘Measuring the Visitor Experience’).
At the end of this process, you’ll have your visitor journey mapped out. You’ll have some idea where problems might arise, and you might even know how to fix them. This clarity is exactly why it's important to go through this exercise collaboratively.
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