User Experience at Museums

Study Description

This project focuses on acquiring a better understanding of visitor behaviour patterns at exhibitions in a museum setting. The amount of time spent and the way visitors interact with each display plays a vital role in curation-related decision making. Further, as museums move towards digitizing various aspects of the museum experience, we are interested in understanding if digitization, specifically of museum labels, has a positive impact on a visitor’s museum experience. Using technological solutions, we aim at designing methodologies that enable us with privacy-aware monitoring of visitor movement patterns through museum rooms. This allows us to determine how much time each participant spends at each display or room.

It is important to note that the solutions used in this project don’t use face recognition and don’t store identifiers relating to visitors in any databases. This study was reviewed under strict ethical guidelines by the University of Waterloo Office of Research Ethics, ORE # 43272. If you have any concerns that you would like to address to the Office of Research Ethics, please contact ResearchOffice@uwaterloo.ca

Thank you to the participants

Thank you for participating in this experiment. The collected data will contribute to a better understanding of the appropriate direction of future development in the museum studies.

All captured data will be de-identified and stored on a secure password-protected lab server with access only to the researchers. Once all the data is analyzed for this project, we plan on sharing general statistical information with the research community through seminars, conferences, presentations, and journal articles. If you are interested in receiving more information regarding the results of this study, or would like a summary of the results, please contact project coordinator Owais Hamid at omabdulh@uwaterloo.ca, and when the study is completed, anticipated by the end of summer 2022, we will send you the information. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the study, please do not hesitate to contact us by email.

This study has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Committee (ORE#43272). If you have questions for the committee contact the Office of Research Ethics, at 1-519-888-4567 ext. 36005 or ore-ceo@uwaterloo.ca.

People

Steven Bednarski, Project Director and Primary Investigator
Caley McCarthy, Project Manager
Owais Hamid, University of Waterloo
Patrick Shaghaghi, University of Waterloo