Graham Black
Graham Black is a 'practitioner academic' who combines his role as Professor of Museum Development at Nottingham Trent University with his work as a consultant in heritage interpretation. He has written two best selling books - 'The Engaging Museum' (2005) and 'Transforming Museums in the 21st Century' (2012). Exhibitions on which he has acted as a consultant have twice won the UK Art Fund Prize. His current work is focused on 'Museums in the 'Age of Participation' and 'Museums and the Democratisation of the Past'
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1. To focus on the museum user experience in a strategic, holistic way.
2. To take readers on the journey that is the museum user experience, through the many single point (or ‘touchpoint’) elements that together make up the visit, discussing how each of these can be improved.
3. To emphasise the importance of regular evaluation of the museum environment as a basis both for improvement and to help build the staff self-awareness culture essential for change.
The paper is broken down into six sections. The Introduction defines the museum environment - the surroundings or conditions, physical, virtual and atmospheric, within which the museum visit takes place - and argues for its importance to the user experience-centred museum, particularly in reaching out to new audiences. The second section looks briefly at museum audiences, the starting point for anyone seeking to focus on the user experience. The third section defines the holistic museum user experience - the sum total of the memorable impacts of all aspects of a museum visit on users. It explores the range of experiences encountered in the museum and focuses on the need for museums to create the best environments in which to have those experiences. The fourth section forms the bulk of the paper, exploring the museum journey: ‘a timeline – a journey from a person’s first thought of visiting a museum, through the actual visit and then beyond, when the museum experience remains only in the memory’ (Falk and Dierking, 1992: xv). The section builds from that concept to create a framework, in the form of a wheel, for charting the museum journey, illustrated in figure 1. This framework then provides the structure for the section. The fifth section – evaluation – discusses five ways of evaluating your museum environment, emphasising the importance of creating a self-aware culture so that all members of staff and volunteers are constantly looking for ways to improve. The sixth and final section - planning the museum environment – makes clear that enhancing the museum environment is not something that can be done in a haphazard or piecemeal fashion. The museum user experience is a holistic one, so every element is of importance – and, as elements are changed, their impact is cumulative, so the changes need to be implemented in the right sequence to ensure consistency. Therefore, there needs to be an overall plan, even if not all of it can be actioned at once. It then puts forward some initial suggestions for getting started. The ambition is eventually to add a further section, providing links to relevant case studies.