Visualizing museum visitors’ behavior: Where do they go and what do they do there?

Museum curators and personnel are interested in understanding what is happening at their museum: what exhibitions and exhibits do visitors attend to, what exhibits visitors spend most time at, what hours of the day are most busy at certain areas in the museum and more. We use automatic tracking of visitors’ position, movements and interaction at the museum to log visitor information. Using this information, we provide an interface that visualizes individual and small group movement patterns, presentations watched, and aggregated information of overall visitor engagement at the museum. We utilized a user centered design approach in which we gathered requirements, iteratively designed and implemented a working prototype and evaluated it with the help of domain experts (museum curators and other museum personnel). We describe our efforts and provide insights from the design and evaluation of our system, and outline how it might be generalized for other indoor domains such as supermarkets or shopping malls.