Projects /
Arts & Culture
Testing digital ideas with gallery visitors
How an arts organisation set up a small innovation lab to test digital visitor experiences with real audiences, before committing budget to any of them.
Client
Confidential
Sector
Arts & Culture
Services
Innovate More Accelerator
Delivered
Innovation lab, visitor prototypes, partner pilots
The outcome
1
front door for ideas
Every idea defines its problem, audience and success measure before it gets budget.
Days
to visitor feedback
Low-cost prototypes are tested with real visitors in the galleries, not over months.
Funded
pilots with partners
Ideas that work are offered to partners as pilots, so new technology arrives tested.
The Challenge
The organisation was regularly pitched digital ideas, from AR guides to digital collectibles, by vendors and by its own team. Each one sounded promising and each one needed budget before anyone knew if visitors would use it. Some ideas were built and quietly abandoned. Others were never tried. Either way, the organisation was not learning from its own audience.
WHY IT MATTERS: INDUSTRY DATA
79
%
Want digital access
To unseen collections
48
%
Digital projects on target
Enterprise-wide
76
%
Say digital lifted visit
Of museum visitors surveyed
What we did
1
Set up one front door
We set up a simple process for every idea: what problem it solves, who it is for and how success will be measured.
2
Prototyped with visitors
We built low-cost versions of the strongest ideas and tested them with real visitors in the galleries, gathering feedback in days rather than months.
3
Brought partners in early
Ideas that worked were offered to partners to back as pilots, so new technology arrived funded and tested.
What happened next
The organisation now decides on digital ideas with evidence from its own visitors. Partners can see a working prototype before they commit, which turns innovation into something they want to fund.
