The Big Picture about the Small Screen:
Who’s Our Audience and What Do They Do?

By: Brad Larson, Brad Larson Media

What a difference a decade makes. Whenon technology in 1997, it was, to be honest, a painstaking and delicate process, grappling with the rise of technology in exhibits, and balancing this rise with an overarching suspicion among children’s museums about technology. I mentioned the Web back then, but it was still fairly new. Most Web sites were like brochures, and we thought our visitors might read some of the brochures. That was it.

Here we are a decade later. As a field, we are still skeptical about the role of technology in our visitors’ lives. But there really is no question about whether or not we should be using the Web. It is a vital communication tool. Our visitors, including parents who are younger and more tech savvy than many of us, use it a lot. And many of them are using it to participate, creating content and sharing it with others.

So the Web is here for us, and we are using it. But how do we use it in a way that is best for museums with visitor-centered missions? Mostly I think we’ve been poking at it with a stick rather than actively shaping it to work for us. A decade ago I suggested we take a look at three theories of learning— social learning, constructivism and multiple intelligences—and use these theories to shape how we night use new media. These are still helpful. But here are a few more thoughts.

Using Web Sites to Encourage Real-World Activity

A few years ago, Paula Sincero and I wrote a paper for the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver titled “Using Museum Web sites to Change Visitors’ Real-World Behaviour” (www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/larson/larson.html). The focus was based on our project with Smithsonian’s National Zoo on temperate forest habitat conservation, and ways of encouraging visitors to take real-world action to protect these habitats. To cut to the chase, we offered the following guideline: “any exhibit Web site should encourage at least three hours of real-world activity away from the computer.”

“Three hours of real-world activity”— it’s helpful to let this thought sink in a bit. I admit that three hours is an arbitrary number. But it is a helpful number, because it forces us to think a little more deeply about what the visitor might actually do. What about visiting a local park and doing a nature sketch? What would the visitor need to get started? A notepad? What else? The more we can visualize the end activity and the resources required, the more likely it will really happen. The Good to Grow! Web site addresses this process also, and is a reflection of the principle of using media to encourage real-world activity.

There may be some surprising ways that media can support real-world activity. Colleague David Becker, formerly at DuPage Children’s Museum and now at the Brookfield Zoo, told me a very interesting story about how his daughter has a horse— a real horse—that she brushes every day. But she also has a virtual horse online who she checks in with daily. Her relationship with her online horse doesn’t detract from her experience with her real horse; in fact, it supports it with another layer of interest on top of her experience.

ACTION STEPS
Next time you are designing Web pages for a particular exhibit, consider, “What resources can we include or link to that realistically will engage the visitor in physical real-world activities for three or more hours?”

Who’s Our Audience?

We are children’s museums, but our Web audience isn’t primarily children: it is their parents and teachers. We probably know this intuitively already, but stating it and acknowledging it is a powerful step in the design process. It helps us make decisions about where to invest time (and money) when developing new Web pages.

This will become increasingly important in the future, because the momentum of Web activity now focuses on social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies such as photo sharing, Facebook and other social sites. Participation and content creation are major themes to this experience—other articles in this issue discuss them. These are activities that work well with adults (and teens), but can be problematic with young children. Although it is possible to develop this type of site for children (for example, the popular Club Penguin), it is expensive to build them, and they require careful monitoring.

So it is helpful to acknowledge that our Web audience is primarily an adult audience—an audience working on behalf of (and sometimes in conjunction with) our child audience. This can allow us to develop sites tailored to an audience of parents, teachers and caregivers using formats that work well with them.

ACTION STEPS
Consider your current Web site. What sections are for parents/teachers? Which are for kids? How can you strengthen the resources and participatory aspects for the adult/caregiver audience?

The Power of PDF
If the big picture is to encourage realworld learning that can happen away from the computer, then we need a vehicle to take visitors from the computer screen to the real world. There are technological solutions on the horizon. Especially promising are the ubiquitous mobile phones. But for now the most manageable solution is to provide printable resources—familiar “activity sheets”— that don’t disappear when you shut down the computer or walk into another room.

The PDF format is one that naturally encourages people to print. For onscreen viewing, it’s not the most practical. It takes a moment to launch, and text can appear at awkward sizes. But once you’ve opened it onscreen, it has an affordance that naturally encourages users to print it out.

I was surprised in our project with the National Zoo how many people were downloading the one-page PDF resources we had developed (see below). In fact, early usage statistics showed that as many people were accessing the PDFs as were accessing a popular high-end Flash game that we also developed. The piece of paper may be our best link from the computer to the world.

ACTION STEPS:
Next time you develop an exhibit Web page, consider one to two page resource sheets that you might develop that encourage exploration away from the computer.

Brad Larson develops media to record visitors’ stories in exhibits after working as Technology Developer at Boston Children’s Museum for ten years. He writes a blog on museum technologies found at http://weblog.bradlarson.com.

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