Personal Profiles and Museums

    So who is the "me" in the museum experience? Museums are surprisingly poor at allowing visitors--even members--to self-identify and provide custom experiences based on unique visitor profiles. Asserting personal identity with respect to an institution is something we do daily in other environments. When I walk into my climbing gym, the staff member at the desk greets me by name. When he looks me up in the computer, he sees how often I come, what classes I’ve taken, and any major safety infractions on record. In short, he knows me by my actions relative to the gym, and he can offer me custom information based on my past behavior. I have a relationship with the institution, mediated by a computer and a smiling face.

    Not so at museums. Even at institutions where I'm a member, I rarely am tracked as anything but another body through the door. This lack of personalization at the front door sets an expectation that I am not valued as an individual in this museum. I am just a faceless visitor.

    To some extent, ameliorating that facelessness via personalization is a question of good guest service. Danny Meyer, restauranteur and hospitality expert, encourages his staff across several restaurants to keep "customer notes" that can easily be shared between reservationists, maitre-d's, wait staff, and managers. When a couple calls to make a reservation for their anniversary, the reservationist notes it, and when the couple arrives at the restaurant, their special occassion is discretely acknowledged and celebrated by the staff via a free bottle of wine or preferred service. While this can be facilitated digitally, it doesn't take complicated tools to create an environment in which guests are treated personally based on their preferences and interests. For example, at another New York restaurant, the maitre d’ asks each party whether this is their first visit when he seats them. If the group says yes, they receive red napkins. If they are returners, they receive white napkins. That way, every passing staff member can visually identify and respond to guests uniquely based on whether they are new or returning patrons.

    It feels magical when a florist remembers your name or a waiter brings you your coffee just the way you like it. But personalization can go much further than creating positive guest experiences. At its best, personalization creates an opportunity for visitors to enter museums on their own terms and to experience the institution based on their own learning styles, interests, and affinities. This doesn't mean that the museum needs to know and be responsive to every detail of each visitor's personal identity.  Instead, each museum needs to develop a framework for what the "visitor profile" should be relative to the institution.

    Consider, for example, the Sony Wonder Technology Lab in New York City. The Lab is a hands-on science center focused on creative use of digital technologies. When you enter, you start the visit by "logging in" at a kiosk that records your name, your voice, your photo, and your favorite color and music genre. Then, that profile is saved onto an RFID card that you use to access all of the interactive exhibits in the Lab. Each exhibit greets you by name at the beginning of the experience. When you augment an image, you distort your own face. When you make an audio mashup, your voice is part of the mix. This may sound gimmicky, but it's incredibly emotionally powerful. It draws you into every exhibit via your own narcissism. What could be more personally relevant--and compelling--than your own image and voice? At the Lab, your profile is a cache of personal data you can draw on as collaborator, co-creating the exhibit content.

    For the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, the visitor's personal profile is a set of visitor-contributed content that can be inserted into the exhibit infrastructure.  This makes sense in the context of a hands-on museum full of interactive exhibits in which you are modifying digital assets. But what's the right visitor profile for a history museum or an art museum? How might visitors self-identify relative to a research institution or a natural history museum?

    There is no "right" answer for what a visitor profile should be. Instead, museums should consider the framework of what will go into the visitor profile. Institutions and websites that use profiles set different constraints to support particular kinds of profiles to fit the overall context of their services. The status update is a prime example. Status updates are short messages that users of many online services use to self-define their current state. Status updates may be messages like, "I'm going out to lunch with my mom," or "Just found this amazing resource for calculus teachers!" They constitute a kind of mini-profile, frequently updated, which reflects the author's self-expression over time.

Here are the ways that four different online services solicit status updates:

    1.    On Twitter, an open short-messaging site, asks, "What are you doing?"

    2.    Facebook, a social network for friends, asks, "What's on your mind?"

    3.    Yammer, a private short-messaging service for corporations, asks, "What are you working on?"

    4.    Creative Spaces, a social space for collections of museum objects, asks, "What inspires you?"

    Each of these questions reflects the unique structure, usage, and content of each service. Because Twitter is designed as a broadcasting service, the focus is on action--things you do, links you discover. Since Facebook is focused towards social webs of friends, the solicitation is more personal, inviting people to share their feelings. Yammer is used by colleagues who care how your 2pm client meeting went, not how your cat is doing. And Creative Spaces wants to support people exploring and being creatively energized by ideas and objects, so they ask people to define themselves via personal inspiration.

    To construct the right profile question, you need to consider the profile or status experience both for the contributor and the spectator. Of course, in most cases, contributors are spectators and vice versa; the audience is blended. But it's important to consider how people will perceive the question both when they are asked to answer it and when they are reading the answers. For contributors, the question must be friendly and simple enough that people feel they can confidently answer the question. Even if some people choose to write embarrassing or unprofessional things about themselves on their profiles, the profile systems are not set up intentionally to embarrass or trick the contributors.  They are set up to support the contributors sharing what they feel comfortable offering.  In some cases, like Creative Spaces, the question asked is unusual enough to shift the perceptual frame of the whole experience with the site.  If you walk into a space and someone asks you what inspires you, you are primed for an inspirational experience.  If you walk into a space and someone asks you what challenges you, you are primed for competition.

    From the spectator perspective, the questions should generate responses that constitute a body of content that is relevant to the structure of the overall site or institution. Yammer asks, "What are you working on?" and the result is a content stream of professional notes on the ebb and flow of employees' actions. Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?" and the result is a stream of personal thoughts and feelings. The aggregate experience of the content affects spectators' understanding of the overall site and its value to them.

    Sometimes the organizing question is much more specific and limited.  The Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars traveling exhibition opens with a simple question: "Would you go to Mars?" Visitors are forced to enter through one of two gates marked YES and NO. This is not an incredibly personal self-identication experience; after all, you are only able to self-identify with one of two mono-syllabic words, and that self-identification is not tracked with you beyond the gate. But the simple question frames the exhibit experience via a personal lens. The exhibit isn't about people generally facing Mars, it's about how YOU face Mars. This question is easy to answer yet induces grappling. It's personal but not consequential. It frames and personalizes the exhibit experience. And it does all that with just a simple set of gates and a yes or no question.

    When considering which questions or self-identification activities will be most valuable in your institution, you should not restrict yourself solely to considering how these will be useful to visitors. Profile systems generate data that can be used both to enhance the visitor experience and to inform the research, marketing, and programming activities of institutions. Some institutions, notably libraries, intentionally avoid retaining visitor data to preserve the privacy of their patrons. Of course, there are ways to deal with personal data even in an anonymized fashion; for example, the Haarlem Oost library’s visitor book-tagging system (tied to books, not patrons) is used as one factor in determining which books should be retired and which kept in circulation.

    For institutions which feel they can ethically collect and use profile data, there are many directions to take the information. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center, for example, recommends specific programs to patrons based on those they have previously purchased tickets for, staggering their offerings to match (or slightly accelerate) the frequency with which patrons have historically elected to visit. Some educational software packages track childrens’ progress learning to read and offer custom content both to the users and their parents. Just as Librarything’s active provision based on my growing profile increases my affinity for and dependence on the service, cultural institutions can comparably grow their relationships with visitors via personalization systems. While such data can be used for crude marketing purposes, it also can provide an important feedback loop in institutions’ research and development of experiences that will be most valuable to particular visitors as well as general audiences. We’ll return to this topic in a few pages to see how profile systems can positively impact membership purchases, repeat visitation, and overall visitor-institution relationships.

    Imagine you have just one question to ask visitors that can be used to contextualize their experience relative to your museum. What would you ask them?  How do you see visitors defining themselves in the museum? How do they wish to self-identify in the museum, and how can that activity lead to a better experience for institution and visitors alike?

Continue to the next section, or return to the outline.