What engagement and retention mean here
Visitor engagement is a loose term. In practice it covers attention, effort and emotional response during a visit: looking, touching, reading, talking, laughing. Retention is a separate idea, with two common meanings. One is what visitors remember afterward. The other is whether they come back. Both are worth distinguishing, because an exhibit can do well at one and poorly at the other.
This article looks at how digital exhibits may affect each, and at why the evidence needs to be handled with care. Broader questions of what people learn are covered in the main discussion of learning outcomes.
Dwell time
The simplest engagement measure is how long someone stays at an exhibit. It is easy to record by hand, with sensors or from software logs, and the numbers are easy to compare. Measuring dwell time is therefore popular.
It is also ambiguous. A long stay might mean fascination, confusion, a conversation that has nothing to do with the display, or a child who will not leave. A short stay might mean disinterest, or it might mean the point was made quickly and well. For these reasons, dwell time is best read alongside observation of what people are doing.
Some patterns are worth noting, with the caveat that they vary by site:
- Visitors often spend much less time at individual exhibits than designers expect, especially in busy galleries.
- Screens can attract short, shallow interactions from many people, while a smaller number stay longer.
- Time at an exhibit tends to depend on its position, on crowding and on how tired visitors are, as well as on its content.
Active versus deep engagement
Digital exhibits are good at prompting activity. Touching, choosing and answering questions are easy to count. But activity is not the same as thinking. A visitor can tap through a game without absorbing its content, and a visitor who stands quietly reading may be deeply engaged.
Designs that use points, levels or challenges can draw people in, and gamification can hold attention for a time. It can also shift focus to the reward instead of the subject. Whether this helps depends on how closely the game mechanics connect to the idea the exhibit is trying to convey.
It helps to ask what kind of engagement is intended: curiosity, reflection, social interaction, emotional response or practical skill. Different goals call for different signs of success.
What people remember
Long-term memory of a museum visit is often general. Visitors may remember the feeling of a place, a striking object, who they went with or a particular moment, more than specific facts. Studies of museum recall, as commonly described, suggest that memories can persist for a long time but are often selective and reshaped over the years. Specific numbers about how much people retain should be treated with suspicion unless they come from a well-documented study of a comparable setting.
Some factors are thought to support memory, though none is guaranteed:
- an emotional or personal connection to the content
- a clear, simple central message
- doing or making something related to the subject
- discussing the experience with companions, during or after the visit
- a link between what is seen on screen and a real object in the room
Evaluators who want to examine recall often use follow-up contact, such as short interviews or visitor surveys a few weeks after the visit. These are labor-intensive, and response rates can be low, so results may reflect the people who chose to answer.
Repeat visits
Whether people come back depends on many things unrelated to any one exhibit: location, cost, school calendars, family circumstances and what else is on. Digital exhibits can contribute in some ways. Content that changes, such as new challenges, rotating stories or seasonal material, gives a reason to return. Features that continue after the visit, like saved items or a web follow-up, can keep a connection going.
The needs of returning visitors differ from those of first-timers. Someone who has seen the screen several times may want something new, or a quicker route to what they care about. An exhibit that repeats the same content every time risks being skipped by regulars. Families may return because a child asks to, which is worth considering when thinking about family visitors.
It is hard to attribute a return visit to a particular exhibit. Surveys can ask what prompted the visit, but self-reports are imperfect. Overall museum attendance can rise or fall for reasons that have nothing to do with the media inside.
Reading the data sensibly
A few habits help avoid overclaiming:
- Combine at least two kinds of evidence, such as counts from logs and notes from visitor observation.
- Compare like with like. A weekday morning with school groups is not comparable with a Saturday afternoon.
- Keep in mind the novelty effect. A new screen often attracts more use at first than it will once it becomes familiar.
- Note who is not being counted, such as visitors who avoided a crowded station or could not use the interface.
- Write down in advance what result would count as success, so that the numbers are not interpreted afterward to fit.
Measures of engagement are useful for improving an exhibit, but they are rough guides, not proof that visitors learned, enjoyed or will return.