A while back, I reported that we were in the process of a trial period with QR codes. We’ve just taken a look at the stats, so I’m giving a run down of what we’ve seen. If I asked the Magic 8-Ball if we’d continue with QR in the New Year, I think the response might be anything from “outlook not so good” to “don’t count on it” or, possibly, “cannot predict now.”
In general, our staff at the Visitor Desk is seeing increased QR awareness among visitors and a rise in demand for the mobile palm card we produced, but stats will help us tell the story. If you remember, we were trying codes in several ways. If you don’t, it might be a good idea to review the first post before continuing with this one.
We put a code on the back of our entrance tags that served as an introduction what visitors might find behind QR codes throughout the building. Every visitor coming in the door gets one of these tags, but only 1.77% of visitors responded by scanning the code.
Of the visitors that scanned the code on the entrance tags, an average 41% of those users (.728% of total visitors) scanned the tags that would let them mobile search The Dinner Party, Luce Visible Storage or play Gallery Tag. At first glance this looks like a win, right? Well, that’s true until you compare pre and post QR code use. These numbers are a little tricky for various reasons, but when looking at Gallery Tag as an example we saw a five-fold drop in use….and five-fold is a very conservative extrapolation from the stats.
Of the visitors that scanned the code on the entrance tags, an average 3.37% of those users (.059% of total visitors) scanned the codes that were placed on objects. That may seem very low overall, but finding the codes we had placed on 30 objects out of the 3000+ on view, was a bit of a task—I’m honestly surprised the numbers were as high as they were. In terms of the content, visitors “liked” the poems much more than they “disliked” them with a 3-1 margin, so using this material as a trial proved to be pretty sound.
Lastly, we put a QR code on all the advertising for The Latino List, so people could download the exhibition’s iPhone app. Given the amount of advertising that was done, it seems incredible that the code was scanned only 118 times. Yes, that’s right, 118 scans, but this figure seems right in line with Adam Greenfield’s research at Urbanscale.
So, I think what we end up with is simply a project that isn’t an overwhelming success or failure. Certainly, QR on advertising didn’t do so well for us. QR use in the building is overall very low, with visitors seeming to favor application-like uses for it. However, compared to pre-QR code use, the use of those applications dropped significantly. This suggests that QR might be appropriate for special projects, but that we probably need to stay away from it as a baseline visitor amenity if we are to be at all inclusive about how we serve content.
If you are using QR in your museum and have stats on use, I’d be curious to hear if your experience is the same or differs. If you are a visitor who’s used QR here, I’d love to know your thoughts on your experience. What do you think? Is this a win, lose or draw?
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Thanks for sharing these!
These figures would seem to match what others are experiencing. As you know we had better take up at Powerhouse in Sydney only when we built the scanner into a (free) exhibition catalogue App.
What would be interesting to compare the QR codes with would be the non-QR code mobile visitation to the same items/objects/URLs. That will give you a better comparison of whether the QR codes are beneficial or not.
If the QR code users represent a high % of the total mobile visitors for the content in question then you’ll be able to show that the QR codes helped bring that content to the surface for them. If, however, the % is low – or the overall figure is too low to be useful – it will suggest that perhaps visitors simply don’t want to find out more either via QRs or, worse, at all.
Thanks for the stats! I’d probably use both the phone icon and the QR code for a while to see if the symbols’ combined use outperforms their individual use. It would make sense to feature a generic smartphone more prominently than the QR code, too.
Thanks for posting your experiences with QR codes, Shelley!
What is your general policy on cell phone use, and how is it posted around the museum? In general, I think it’s hard for visitors to get past the idea that cell phones are “not allowed” in a museum. This social stigma sometimes seems to inhibit visitors from more actively using their smartphone to engage in their site visit. Your mobile palm card is clear, concise, and useful, but perhaps it’s not displayed visibly enough throughout the museum.
Could you try limiting the amount of information the QR code will allow access to? It might make sense to start off with a link to one thing, like an audio clip or a short video. You could change the language on your QR code label to specifically reference whatever it is the QR code brings the user to. I think it’s more encouraging to the visitor to know exactly what using a QR code will unveil.
@MusNightwalker
I’m not sure that QR codes linking to your app is such a great idea. We’ve been arguing that the power of QR codes can be that it links to sites that are under the visitor/users control. Its ten years since people foound out that they could own there own information. The British Museum found that more people used Wikipedia to “find out more” than used their own web site. If your visitors prefer to access information on an Egyptian Mummy using your web site when given a free choice of your site or Wikipedia then fine. If not then let the visitors access the information they owm and look at the links that they have decided is important (ie they built Wikipedia) … and save some money?
Thanks for this post. It’s informative and timely. We are considering both QR in the gallery and a mobile app and I think we will likely go the route of a built in QR reader in the app. We are currently doing a very short survey of on-site visitors to gage interest in an app. We are using a QR code as well as offering a short URL to access the survey with no other explanation other than a request to help us develop our first app. It will be interesting to see how many responses we actually get.
Have anyone looked at the take up rate for apps in different kinds of cultural institutions or museums (art vs natural history vs science , for example)?
Anyhow, thanks for sharing your findings!
@seb – We have those figures for Gallery Tag and the results are stunning. A five-fold drop once we put the content behind QR….that’s conservative. We were seeing a ten fold to five fold drop…it was that significant. We had to do some finagling with anayltics to get the figures, so that’s why we stayed with the conservative drop figure.
@Christiann Agreed, but we have had problems here of too many icons actually becoming more confusing for visitors. We continue to struggle with this.
@Nightwalker RE: cell phone policy…Policy here is very good. We’ve had an open photography policy for years and use cell phone for audio stops, which has good, solid metrics. While this may be a problem in other places, it’s less of one here. RE: what we are pointing to…if you go back and read the original post, you’ll see we do explain what users are getting and that we are pointing to specific uses. I think we’ve got this ground covered in the trial…it points to the codes being a boundary.
@shelley if there’s a 5 to 10x drop post QR then that’s a pretty definitive fail. I’m not quite sure why visitors would be so scared away by the QR codes – usually I’d just expect there to be ‘tolerated ignorance’ of them. People who would usually use Gallery Tag another way shouldn’t have stopped just because of the QRs?
@seb I know! From the outset the figures look decent…not a total win or lose, but that significant drop post QR is very worrying. I wouldn’t say we are ditching the project totally, but moving forward very cautiously and looking specifically at pre and post traffic measures.
You may be interested in a project I’m involved with – QRpedia.
It links museum exhibits with their pages on Wikipedia. We’ve written some technology so that if the user doesn’t speak English, they get the exhibit information in their own language.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis have run a pilot in the USA and it has been very well received – see their case study.
It would be interesting to see if QR uptake in your museum were higher if there were more codes? Or if they lead to a different sort of content?
Anyway, if you’re interested, you can find out more about QRpedia – or drop me an email if you’d like to discuss it further.
@Terence Yeah, Lori just posted a comment about QRpedia on the related post and there’s a lot to think about here with these stats. Interestingly, QR codes aside, we’ve had a lot of luck with in-gallery wikipedia projects – take a look at Wikipop. Like wikipop, I wonder if saying the content is sourced from wikipedia would do a lot to increase interest across the board. However, I’d be cautious there, too…..Wikipop worked for us b/c the information was available on shared ipads, which were inclusive of every visitor. Still, worth thinking about.
As ever, really useful to get your open and honest insights Shelley. We’re undertaking our third QR Code trial at the moment (I’ve just written up an overview/how to on our blog) and the numbers I’m looking at just now indicate a pretty low uptake.
As with your projects, there are a number of reasons why it’s difficult to draw specific conclusions but I can at least see some correlation between where codes are located and how likely they are to be scanned. I’ll try to write our findings up in a meaningful way when the exhibit closes later this month.
I can’t say I disagree with any of the Magic 8-Ball’s predictions and I’ve yet to see anyone proclaiming from the rooftops that QR Codes are a guaranteed safe bet. Healthy scepticism and sensible experimentation seems to be the way ahead for now.
” Given the amount of advertising that was done, it seems incredible that the code was scanned only 118 times.”
Thanks for posting this Shelley, it’s really helpful! I’m curious about this statement, though not familiar with the ad campaign. Do you have any idea what the percentage of click throughs to impressions might have been? Or even approximately how many billboards and the like were posted?
Thanks for the info, It’s been really insightful, particularly the links to the gallery tag app. I just wondered if anybody had tried using QR codes with specific groups rather than general visitors? I’m working on a project with young people and I thought this might be a good way to engage them, prehaps thorugh a semi-formal gallery tour which would allow the participants to explore the gallery, but give them to choice of how much information they access. Any other thoughts?