About the Research:

The Audience and Innovation Directorate is interested in improving the overall visitor experience at Tate. This includes all forms of visitor communication and visitor engagement — both online and onsite. With the advent of AI and Web 3.0 technologies, visitors expectations around the experience at museums and galleries is rapidly evolving.

This research was commissioned by the Tate team to investigate the role of new digital tools in improving visitor experience. This included understanding expectations of Tate’s audiences, documenting and mapping visitor journey through all touch points across Tate Modern and Tate Britain and assessing best practice in the cultural sector around digital tools. Co-creation workshops were conducted with young people to explore new tools that could be introduced on the gallery floor.

Objectives of the Research:

• Exploration of the onsite audience behaviours, motivations and the context in which they engage with digital tools, specifically exploring onsite experiences 
• Understanding how onsite audiences use current digital resources and explore their motivations and mindsets around what they are looking for and how they find it  
• Documentation and mapping out the touch points across visitor communications channels, including ways to improve access and inclusion to understand more about the ‘journey’ made by a visitor to Tate Modern and Tate Britain. This includes how they might look for information before coming to Tate, and on arrival how they engage with spaces, signage, people and resources provided by different departments
• Exploring the needs of various stakeholders at Tate for communicating with visitors and using digital tools for enhancing visitor experience
• Undertaking sector benchmarking and assessing best practice — this was conducted through a series of case studies of museums and galleries across UK and the EU.

​As an outcome, I provided recommendations for a digital engagement framework, for potential use of emerging technologies in creating a seamless personalised end-to-end visitor journey.

​Reach out to me if you would like to access the entire report.

​The Brooks International Fellowship Programme​ supports three research fellows each year to work with a Tate host team in a range of disciplines across the museum, including curatorial, learning, community and partnerships, collection care, research and interpretation, digital practice and visitor communications. The Fellows are hosted by the Delfina Foundation in London.

At the core of the programme is the opportunity for Brooks Fellows to develop their research practice, while collaborating with Tate to provide mutual benefit to and share new perspectives with the museum. The Brooks International Fellowship Programme is generously funded by the Rory and Elizabeth Brooks Foundation.