JAMMIN' BARCELONA

Suggestions to improve Museum Logistics, Museum Experience, and Museum Income:

1.  Allow scheduling of visit reservations via telephone or web even for folks with 1/2 price or gratis tickets.

2.  Supply gratis printed “program” duplicating text next to gallery objects.   

Last Friday with family and friends I visited the Cleveland Museum of Art to view the “Barcelona” Exhibit.  We had a few 1/2 price tickets and bought a few others at full price.

In order to use the 1/2 price tickets, the museum required that a complimentary ticket holder physically come to the museum in person to make a reservation for a specific visit time. 

So Wednesday prior to our visit, I drove to the museum, found a parking space, went in personally and scheduled a visit reservation for 3:00 pm Friday.  Then I went out, got back in the car, and drove home.  Having to physically show up at the museum to schedule a visit reservation is both  a waste of  time and environmentally wrong.   The museum should encourage reservations be made on the web or over the telephone.  It is a bit of a mean trick to feign a “reduced price” ticket, and then put unreasonable and time wasting conditions on the  “reduced price”  ticket which the museum knows, or should know, will result in those tickets being a pain to use.

Even though we had a reservation and had paid for tickets, when we arrived the exhibition hall was mobbed – so humid with moist humans jammed together in the dim light that it reminded me of being in a low-ceilinged locker room after high school gym class.

If you were prone to being impatient or claustrophobic, your visit woulda  been a bust.  I sort of gulped, took a deep breath, and tried to get into the mood…into the human current flowing room to room.

I got in the line of viewers snaking around the walls to view the wall-hung pictures and glass topped cases against the walls with books in them.  To the lower right hand side of each item was the usual descriptive text explaining what it was that the viewer was viewing, with the title of the piece, and the credits to the loaning museum, etc.  They were pretty interesting, but there was a problem.

These tiny print index card size text explanations were one reason that the lines were barely creeping along.    In order to read the text each visitor needed to be less than 3 feet away from the text – and thus the painting.   If two persons were reading the info about an image, one of the two persons had to be physically in front of the picture, which meant that person was rudely in front of the rest of the gallery viewers who were standing further back.   This caused a real hold up in progress through the exhibits.  Since each gallery was at max capacity, it wasn’t feasible to go look at something else and come back a bit later.  The crowd was not likely to be diminishing.

Making reading even more difficult and slow was the fact that the font point in the text type was small, the font was white against a sienna, tanny- brown background – the “theme” color of the Mediterranean - Pyrenees exhibit.  The contrast between white print and tan background is low.   I think it is a mistake to cause reading to be more difficult for the sake of pandering to a stylish color scheme.  Making the text even less visible was the fact the museum lighting was centered on the displayed painting or print, and not on the text explanation.   When’s the last time you chose to read the newspaper in a darkened closet?

The physical juxtaposition between being required to stand 12 feet away from a painting in order to view it most comfortably and enjoyably, and then being required to approach within inches of the painting to read about it would flagrantly fail any time/motion analysis.   I’m surprised that museums haven’t figured out what United Parcel Service has down pat…that the fewest steps to accomplish the task rewards everyone…

But forget about the museum visitor client.  Let’s go straight to the bottom line.  Tickets cost $12.00 each.  Museum clients are already offered an audio player which is keyed by numbers to many of the exhibit pieces.   The audio listeners usually stand in the middle of the gallery floor and don’t slow the progress of the other viewers. 

If the museum printed all of the explanatory text in a free brochure, clients wouldn’t even have to read it all during their visit, so the trip through the galleries could go much faster; – you’d be able to concentrate on the art, read about what you wanted, and read anything else later.  A web site should also carry the text, so you wouldn’t need to bring the printed hard copy home.  How many more visitors would go through the gallery in a day?  How much future traffic would the improved visitor experience generate?  How many people would see the brochure on your coffee table and go themselves to see the exhibit?

Let’s say that even 10 more clients went through in a day.  That would pay  an added $120.00 to the museum – much more than would be necessary to pay for the mass printed brochures which were handed out daily.

And if the Museum staff are uncertain how to increase their client flow and enjoyment through the exhibit, all the museum needs to do is call UPS to make a tax deductible donation by providing UPS’s time and motion experts to analyze and advise on improved flow-through efficiency.  You get the point…

Anyway, the exhibit was jammin!