Its Not the Destination OR Journey Mapping for Museums

 

Touchpoints

Visitor experience is everyone’s job, not just those people who have “visitor” or “experience” in their title. Picture your visitor. What is the first thing that comes to mind? What are they doing? Buying a ticket? Standing in your gallery? Reading your labels. These are the types of touchpoints that are the focus of many museum professionals. However, you are missing important elements of your visitor’s experience. Much of the make and break comes at the moments in between.

Step back for a moment, think about going to the grocery store. You bought vegetables, milk, and bread. You also bought six things that were not on your list. Is that what you remembered? Or did you also remember the old lady who cut you off on the way to the corn? And, the sample guy trying to convince you that “pea-based false meat” is pretty good. Then there was your third-grade teacher standing in the lunch meat aisle. Many of your memories are about the moments in between destinations. As the adage extolls, it’s the journey not the destination.

Pathway Planning

Focusing on the journey requires changing focus from end-point planning, where you focus your energy on the galleries, turning instead to pathways. This shift requires focusing on the visitor’s needs and actions. In doing this, the energy shifts focus from the institution, often placing its decision-making heft in gallery-based decisions, to the visitor, whose experience is often born of the spaces in between the parking lot to the gallery. Mapping out people’s paths is called Journey Mapping, in User Experience Design talk. But, basically, you visualize what people do and why they do it.

Why use Journey Mapping?

As another old adage goes, don’t judge until you walk a mile in his shoes.  The saying, trite as it is, points to the role of understanding in creating a Journey Map. In other words, an ideal pathway planning process requires purpose and empathy to be foregrounded. Instead of just the nodes, or the point of getting somewhere, you spend your energy on every moment in between.  When you do that you learn new insights into your visitors’ decision-making processes. You also learn when serendipity and/ poor planning cause reactions. In other words, you get insight into why people react to your spaces.  In this way, journey mapping helps break through status quo planning, i.e. doing something as its always been done.

How do you Journey Map?

  1. Just as with fiction, journey maps should draw on what you know. So, start by observing patrons. But, then use that as the base to creating your map.
  2. A journey map is not a generic map. The journey map starts with a person. Specificity is essential. This is not like google maps. Instead, it’s more than the map your best friend gives you with asides about great signs and tips about places you will get lost. When doing journey maps, take a point of view. Keep that person in mind as you work.
  3. Next go for story. Imagine this person coming to your organization. Why are they there? What do they want out of it? That will be the motivation. Write out a two-sentence story of their motivations and goals, like the plot of their visit.
  4. The map is sort of the arc of your story, with all the tangents and eddies that your character might need to be authentic. Make sure to think out the path and the stops. Be specific about the character’s motivation and well as their process.
  5. You might imagine that you start by drawing. But, the best journey maps are visualizations of an experience that you have thoroughly planned. They are not random. So, waiting to draw allows you to be purposeful.

Even if you choose to hire someone to do your journey maps, understanding the process is incredibly useful. It helps you understand why maps are useful. They help you understand your visitor’s holistically. Often museum staff prioritize decisions without having a thorough understanding of their visitor. Tools like journey maps help you center your visitor in your process in ways that draw on process and empathy.

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