Horse Riders, Treasure Hunters, Picky Eaters, and Deep Divers: Exploring How Visitors Interact with an Exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

As museums usually target large numbers of visitors with great diversities, it is important for museum professionals to have a well-rounded understanding of the visitors as well as an approach to categorize them so that curation strategies can be applied accordingly and effectiveness achieved. This article presents a study of the exhibition “Dippy Returns” at the Natural History Museum in London. By performing on-site observation, we categorized visitors-by their movements and interactions with the exhibits-into four types: Horse Riders, Treasure Hunters, Picky Eaters, and Deep Divers. We also interviewed a curator of the exhibition to understand intended visitor experiences from the museum’s perspective. We believe that the categorization can help museum professionals better understand on-site visitor behaviors from the perspectives of both interactions and movement, which responds to the trend for museum exhibitions nowadays to deploy a diversity of activities and more flexible visiting routes. The categorization could serve as a common language that curators and designers can use to communicate their expectations and improve visitor experiences with exhibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]