ASK App + Group Tours: Shaping the Visitor Experience

In my last post I wrote about our process for deciding which collection highlights to include in ASK’s new self-guided tour, titled Highlights and Hidden Gems. I also hinted at the fact that the choice of works to include was only one facet of our process. As we developed our framework for the tour, we sometimes we felt like we still had more questions than answers.

One question that came up again and again was: how much are we guiding our visitors, and how much are we letting them steer the tour themselves? We were thinking about logistics—e.g., how to get the visitors from one tour “stop” to the next—but also about engagement in our new “choose your own adventure” format.

For way finding and directions, the brochure that our Design team is developing for us plays an important part. Sara will be blogging next week about this brochure, so I’ll just give a few quick hints here: Thumbnail images of the works will help visitors spot them easily. A floor plan will give the “big picture.” And the designation of works as “highlights” versus “hidden gems” will allow visitors to craft their own experience. Meanwhile, the ASK team was working on an outline of factual content for each “highlight” and “gem.” This way, we would have access to consistent, prepared information and language to share with our visitors, no matter who was staffing the tour on any given day.  As things turned out, however, our shift from a tightly curated highlights list to a broader “menu” required some tweaks to our engagement strategy.

Colleagues who tested the tour concept with us, fill out a survey after their experience. A big take-away was the need to give visitors a certain amount of control over their experience (e.g. in selecting the works to visit), while also providing enough structure to the content with each work so visitors felt appropriately “guided.”

We tested our tour concept with several groups of colleagues from July through November and we gathered lots of helpful feedback. Some of it was related to the choice of works, but most of it revolved around engagement. Many of our testers felt a bit lost, even with their map prototypes. They would have liked more directives about how exactly to connect with each work of art and when to move on. They also expressed a desire to know more about our reasoning for choosing each work (i.e., what makes it a highlight?) as well as transitions and connections between stops. And they noticed when our replies seemed “scripted”; apparently we needed to think about the problem of our replies feeling packaged, rather than personalized.

In follow-up discussions, we agreed that we had already figured out how to make the most of our project’s unique qualities, like its self-directed, “go-at-your-own-pace” nature. Now we realized that we could also benefit from drawing on our collective experience as educators and “traditional” gallery guides.

After discussion, here are a few of the conclusions that we decided to put into practice:

• We could prompt the tour visitors with a “call to action” for each work, e.g., “Send me a photo of your next selection when you arrive there!
• We should establish our reasons for including each work of art at the outset of our conversation.
• We would guide their looking as if we were right there in the gallery with them: “If you look at the upper area of the canvas, you’ll spot an eagle flying the sky. Now let your eye move downwards…”
• We needed to use our own language as much as possible, relying on our outline for information but not for exact wording.

Once again, we were looking for the “sweet spot” that balanced structure and flexibility. Like many things we do with ASK, a blend of learned experience and new thinking seems to serve us best.

And, speaking of timing, the Highlights and Hidden Gems tour was just added to our website’s Group Tours page this week. We’re looking forward to booking our first groups!