Testing Visitor Flow Before Redesigning an Exhibit
How I used temporary walls and visitor observations to test a potential solution before making an expensive, permanent change to a museum exhibit.
About two years after the Museum of the Bible opened, we had a persistent problem with one of our chronological exhibits: visitors were regularly entering through the exit.
That mattered because the exhibit was designed to be experienced in sequence. Entering from the wrong direction meant encountering the story backwards.
Volunteers had noticed the behavior repeatedly, and our working theory was that the layout around the exit was contributing to the confusion. But changing a permanent exhibit is expensive and difficult to undo. Before recommending a physical redesign, we wanted to know whether a different configuration would actually change visitor behavior.
We could test the idea before commiting to it
The curatorial team identified several configurations that could realistically work within the exhibit.
Rather than immediately altering the permanent space, we used temporary walls to recreate those configurations one at a time.
For each version, I spent several days in the exhibit observing how visitors moved through the space, with particular attention to whether they mistakenly entered through the exit. We then changed the temporary walls and repeated the process with the next configuration.
This let us compare actual visitor behavior across potential solutions without committing to an expensive permanent change.
One configuration clearly reduced the problem
One configuration was more successful at directing visitors away from the exit. Fewer people mistakenly entered the exhibit from the wrong direction when the temporary walls were arranged that way.
I presented the findings and recommended configuration to the Curatorial Director as a potential permanent solution.
The next step was evaluating the feasibility and cost of making the change permanent. I moved on from the museum before seeing whether it was ultimately implemented.
At the time, I was both curator and research. Our knowledge of the exhibit helped us determine which configurations were realistic, but we didn't assume we knew how visitors would respond to them. Observing what people actually did helped us choose between the options.