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Are They Watching? Visitors and Videos in Exhibitions

Article in Curator The Museum Journal · January 2010

DOI: 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2002.tb00049.x

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 Draft of 08 Feb. 02
Are They Watching? Visitors and Videos in Exhibitions
by Beverly Serrell, Serrell & Associates, Chicago, IL
Introduction
Videos in museum exhibitions provide a dynamic, audiovisual, linear narrative experience.
They serve a variety of purposes, such as, to give an introduction or overview to an
exhibition, present complex issues, show changes over time, demonstrate a process, or
convey a personal story. Videos offer an alternative to reading text labels and looking at
objects or photographs.

To watch a video from beginning to end requires a specified time commitment from visitors,
since videos usually last somewhere from two to 15 minutes. Paying this much attention is
“expensive” in terms of visitors’ time budgets. From the museum’s investment of dollars,
videos are expensive to produce professionally. What makes videos worth the museum’s
expense and the visitor’s time?

In the case of the traveling exhibition The Changing Face of Women’s Health, a decision was
made by the developers early in the planning process that the exhibition would depend to a
large extent on videos of women telling their own stories. This, it was decided, would be
the best way to let women speak personally for themselves and to convey the most
emotional content. As the exhibition traveled, the exhibit developers wanted to know how
the videos were being used by visitors: Were people attracted to the videos? How long did
visitors spend watching them? Did visitors like and remember them? Empirical data, and
enough of it, can begin to answer these questions.

This paper will summarize the results of the Women’s Heath summative evaluation video
study, place it in the context of data from other sources, present a database of video-
watching behavior, and discuss the implications for using videos in exhibitions.

The Women’s Health Video Evaluation Study

A special study of five videos (Serrell, Ratcliffe and Prager 2001) that were part of The
Changing Face of Women’s Health was conducted as the exhibition was on display at three
venues: Maryland Science Center, New York Hall of Science, and Oregon Museum of Science
and Industry. The five videos in the study were: Approaching the 14th Moon, One Woman’s
Story (Alice), Period Piece, Mammogram Stories (Noni), and Genetic Testing.

The format for the five videos consisted of women talking personally and professionally
about menopause (Moon), heart disease (Alice), menstruation (Period Piece),
mammograms (Noni), and breast cancer (Genetic Testing). Engagingly presented, and
often emotional, these videos gave voices and faces to many women’s issues and feelings
about their health and bodies. All of the women in the videos were real people, not actors.
The topics discussed in the videos were supported by other exhibit elements nearby,
including displays about hormone replacement therapy and osteoporosis, heart attacks,
sexual development, and detection and prevention of breast cancer. Labels on each
monitor gave the program’s running time and a brief synopsis of the content. As with most
videos, no formative evaluation was done.

In summative tracking-and-timing studies, data were collected on the number of visitors

attracted to each video, and from this, the percentage of visitors attracted to the videos
was calculated. In focused observations and timing studies, the amount of time visitors
spent watching, or holding time, was recorded, and, from this, the average time was
calculated. The holding power--total running time of the video divided by the average
holding time--was calculated for each video. Holding power is an especially important

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measure for storytelling videos, and a score of 1.0 would indicate that the running time of
the show and the average time spent by visitors were the same (like at most movie
theaters). Exit questionnaires and telephone interviews two months later collected data on
visitors’ recollections.

Figure 1 summarizes the quantitative data of attracting power and holding power gathered
by unobtrusively observing and tracking and timing approximately 30 or more visitors in the
exhibition at each of the five videos. These two calculations help directly answer the
questions, How many people were attracted to the videos?, and, How long did visitors
spend watching them? and give an indirect measure of the answer to the question, Did
visitors like them?

Attracting power ranged from 12% to 35%, with an average of 23%. Holding power ranged
from .03 to .50, and the average holding power was .20. there was no apparent correlation
between the running time and the average time or between the attracting power and the
holding power. The location of the video, intended audience, content, and running time all
seemed to contribute to the different success rates--the video’s ability to attract and hold
visitors attention.

From interviews with visitors to Women’s Health, there was evidence that they liked the
videos and remembered using them. “Videos were the most informative and enjoyable
thing.” “Great diversity--they really covered everything.” People said they learned new
things from the videos, and two months later, during the phone interviews (with a different
set of visitors) people also recalled seeing and liking the videos and what they were about.
Recalling the videos of Noni and Period Piece, visitors said, “I liked the videos--
mammograms was a good one.” “I spent lots of time watching the menstruation movie
with my daughter”. In addition to recalling that they saw a video, people mentioned their
thoughts and feelings related to the experience, particularly Alice, Noni, and Period Piece:
“The woman who had heart attacks--and kept going--it was different and surprisingly sad.”
“I felt bad for the women in the video and anyone with breast cancer.” “The exhibit about
menstruation made me laugh! Funny! Seems ridiculous now what our mothers told us.”

While the evaluation results showed that all the videos in Women’s Health were popular and
memorable to some visitors, One Woman’s Story, or Alice, was clearly the most successful
in terms of its attracting power (35%) and holding power (.50). The factors that may have
contributed to it’s success were: It has a short running time; it stands alone and is not one
of several choices of videos; and Alice’s story is very compelling--both in content and
delivery. Video developers expected that Alice would attract attention from both genders
and hold visitors’ attention all the way through: “If they stop for a few seconds, they will
get hooked.” This proved to be true more so than for any of the other videos, evidenced by
the frequency distribution of the visitors’ watching times for Alice (Figure 2), which showed
a distinct second bump in the curve, an unusual feature in the distribution of visitors’ time
at exhibits (Serrell 2001).

The other videos in Women’s Health had longer running times than Alice. Some were aimed
at a smaller segment of visitors. For example, Genetics was more technical. Some were
edited as episodic segments that could be watched individually or sequentially, such as
Period Piece and The 14th Moon. In these latter two cases, the running times of the videos
were the sum of the segments added together. Visitors could watch one, several or all of
the episodes. In these cases, a longer holding time was not necessary for visitors to “get
it.”

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Alice was remarkable in terms of Women’s Health, but how does it compare to videos in
other exhibitions? Were its attraction and holding rates normal or average, below average,
or exceptionally high?

Data from other studies

To put the Women’s Health data in perspective, we looked for other visitor behavior data on
videos. Roger Miles published a paper “Audiovisuals: suitable case for treatment” (Miles
1989) with attracting and holding power data from six videos that were part of “Discovering
Mammals” at the Natural History Museum, London. See Figure 3.

Attracting power ranged from 16% to 50%, with an average of 36%. Holding power ranged
from .12 to .69, and the average holding power was .41. Miles suggested there was a
negative correlation between running time and holding power, but it was “not absolute.”

Visitors interviewed in Discovering Mammals commented favorably about the media. Miles
concluded that videos are liked by visitors but are not well-attended, that is, attracting and
holding powers were generally low, and, “This coexistence of acceptability and poor
performance demands further study.” Compared to the Woman’s Health videos, however,
the averages for attraction and holding power in Discovering Mammals are higher. Against
what empirical standards of performance was Miles measuring his data? If Miles believes
that his data showed “poor performance,” what data exists that shows examples of videos
that were highly effective?

Our search for data turned to a recent exhibition that was said to have videos that
successfully captured and held visitors’ attention. In Figure 4, data from six stand-alone
videos in “The American Presidency” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History are shown. Attraction rates ranged from 26% to 58%, and holding power ranged
from .27 to an exceptionally high .81. The summative evaluation of the exhibition reported
that of all the elements in the exhibition, “Videos held visitors the longest, an average of
2.9 minutes... .” (Office of Policy and Analysis 2001).

Compared to the other two data sets presented so far, indeed the videos in The American
Presidency show a higher average holding power (.46) than the other two video studies
presented above, but the average attracting power, 35%, was close to the same as
Discovering Mammals. (It should be noted, nevertheless, that casual, unsystematic
observations of visitor behavior in American Presidency lead to anecdotal conclusions that
“everybody watched the videos” and “they stayed to watch the whole thing.”)

Data from the American Presidency contrasts sharply with data on much lower attraction
rates and holding times from the videos in another Smithsonian exhibition, “Science in
American Life.” See Figure 5. The summative evaluation (Institutional Studies Office,
1995) shows attraction rates for ten videos ranged from only 4% to 21%. The average
attraction was 11%. Holding power was not reported and could not be calculated because
running times were not published or available. Average times were reported, however, and
for eight of the 10 videos, the average stop lasted less than 2 minutes (120 seconds).

Starting a database of video data

Figure 6 is a compilation of 18 other videos’ tracking and timing data from an assortment of
summative evaluation studies (some exhibitions and videos are no longer on view). The
first five are one each from Shedd Aquarium (Post 2001), Field Museum of Natural History
(Serrell 1994), Brookfield Zoo (Saunders 2001), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Menninger
1993), and the American Museum of Natural History (Giusti). The next five are from the
Milwaukee Public Museum’s “Rain Forest” (Korenic and Young 1989); three are from the

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National Postal Museum (Serrell 1994), and the final four are videos in the underwater
viewing area in Shedd Aquarium’s Oceanarium (Serrell 1992).

In this data set, attraction power ranges from 7% to 68%, with an average of 36%, and
holding power ranges from .08 to .66, averaging .42. Once again, The American Presidency
videos (refer back to Figure 4), in this comparison of empirical data, were generally more
effective in terms of holding power but not attracting power.

What can be said about the effectiveness of videos from looking at all the data presented so
far in this paper? The discussion below will attempt to draw some conclusions from this
varied assemblage of videos and to identify some of the conditions that seemed to
contribute to a video that attracted more attention and held it longer--or not.

Discussion of the database (N=45)

The collection of data on 45 videos published here (see Appendix) is not a random sample,
so we cannot make any predictions or generalizations about all videos in museum
exhibitions. We can say, however, what the averages are for this collection and what some
of the possibilities for videos are--both the highs and the lows of attracting and holding
power, running times, and average watching times. Museum practitioners can collect data
in their own institutions and use this database to compare the performance of their
exhibition videos with others.

The overall average attraction rate was 32%; the highest was 68%. Postal Patrons, the
highest, was located in a room by itself behind a recreated post office sales window, in a
linear exhibition layout. It showed a sequence of postal patrons through history as they
typically used the postal services. The actors (young, old, male, female) were cleverly
portrayed, and each scene was different, brief and engaging. The video ran for a total of
less than two minutes. It was one of the most popular elements in the whole exhibition.

The lowest score for attraction was 4% in Science for American Life, a 10,000 square-foot
exhibition with more than 100 exhibit elements. Perhaps there was just too much to do.
Another low attraction score was 7% for the 2-minute introductory video in Amazon Rising
at Shedd Aquarium. Placed to the far left as visitors moved into the space from the right,
and competing with large tanks of swimming fishes, this “introduction” was poorly located
and vastly underutilized.

Another low score was from The 14th Moon, in Woman’s Health, that attracted 12%. The
subject was menopause, a topic that might not be self-selected by many younger visitors or
males. “It was aimed at a select audience,” said Margie Prager, the video developer on the
project. Also, it was located in an open floor plan with many other exhibit elements
competing for attention. The open floor plan seemed to contribute to lower-than-average
scores for other videos in Women’s Health, except for Alice (discussed at the beginning of
this article). Alice, it turns out, had a solidly average attraction score (35%) out of the total
database, but it ranked high compared to the other videos in its own exhibition.

The overall mean holding power was .39; the highest was .81. Behind the Scenes at the
White House, with the highest score, was located midway through the exhibition in a
separate screening room. There were large crowds in attendance, controlled by timed
ticketing. “Getting out of the room halfway through the show was extremely difficult,”
recalled video developer Selma Thomas. Thus, the exceptionally high holding score might
reflect the fact that visitors were trapped and could not leave until the show was over.
Nevertheless, the video had an appealing topic. “It was compelling, technically well done,
and at the right place in the exhibition,” Smithsonian researcher Zahava Doering reported.

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The next highest holding power scores were in the 60s. For example, the Neferteri video at
the Getty, made by the BBC for television, was the only video in this small special
exhibition. Although it was 10 minutes long, it had a holding power of .66. Neferteri also
had a high attracting rate of 65%. Interviews with visitors revealed how it helped
communicate the exhibit’s main message. “Clearly, the video was an important means of
conveying information about the restoration and conservation of Neferteri’s tomb”
(Menninger 1993).

Higher than average holding powers may suggest the presence of a second bump or
bimodal distribution of visitors’ time at the video, as was seen in Figure 2 for Alice video.
This bump is evidence of a sub-population of people in the sample whose attention was
captured and held longer, rather than an exponential curve of steadily decreasing numbers
of visitors who made longer stops. Postal Patrons, Boat Ride, Mule Deer, and White House
also had bimodal bumps.

The DNA video, one of two videos in Amber, a special exhibition at the American Museum of
Natural History, attracted 65% and held them as well, with a holding power of .55. even
though, like Neferteri, it had a long running time (11 minutes). Visitors paid a special fee
for Amber, which may have contributed to its being an exceptionally thoroughly used
exhibition overall (Giusti 1996). When Amber traveled to San Francisco and admission was
free, visitors averaged much less time in the exhibition overall--21 minutes versus 33
minutes (Serrell, 1998)--and the attraction power for the video was a much lower 15%.

The lowest holding power was .03 for Genetic in Woman’s Health. Produced by the National
Action Plan on Breast Cancer, “This one was also aimed at a more technically inclined
audience. It contained very detailed information that we felt belonged in the exhibition, but
we didn’t expect most people would watch it,” exhibit developer Margie Prager said.
Another Women’s Health video, Period Piece, also had a low holding power, but it was a 30-
minute video made up of many short segments. “Again, we did not expect visitors to watch
all of them,” Prager noted, “although we noticed that some people actually did.” Admission
to Women’s Health was free.

An example of a video that had close to average scores in the database but satisfied the
goals of the exhibit developers was the Boat Ride video midway through the Swamp
exhibition at Brookfield Zoo. Visitors could sit in a small aluminum skiff as they watched
scenes shot from a boat moving through a swamp. With an attraction rate of 31% and a
holding power of .53, exhibit developer Tim Sullivan said, “I am very happy with the boat
ride in terms of the usage it gets, the amount of time people spend on it, and the added
benefit it brings to the exhibit. Our goal was to give people a chance to see a real swamp.
A key part of the success was including the real boat for people to sit in. It was also helpful
to have put it in a place where it does not compete with animals for viewing.” The longest
time a visitor spent watching was 11 minutes 30 seconds, enough to see it almost four
times.

Of the Forests to Grasslands video--the one with the highest scores in Discovering
Mammals--Roger Miles says, “Its success is likely to be because it deals with a straight
forward story in an easy to follow way. It is not one of these AVs that deal with abstruse or
abstract matter of the sort exhibitors put into an AV for want of a better medium of
communication, and which they should probably leave out of the exhibition anyway.”
Compared to the bigger picture of the database, it turns out that four of the six videos in
Miles’ exhibition had higher than average holding and attracting powers, so his original
estimation of poor performance, comparatively speaking, was mistaken.

5
In the Rain Forest exhibition at Milwaukee Public Museum, six videos ran from 4 minutes 30
seconds to 25 minutes. The highest average time (5 minutes 34 seconds) was spent in the
Amphitheater, a program that ran 10 minutes. “The Rain Forest Amphitheater, centrally
located in the Biology Hall, was the most popular in terms of the amount of time visitors
spent in the theater. Five minutes for a film length might serve as a yardstick for future
exhibit videos planned to be centrally located in exhibitions.” (Korenic and Young, 1989).

Video running times in the database (see Appendix) ranged from 79 seconds (just over one
minute) to 1800 seconds (30 minutes) with half of them under five minutes. Was there a
negative correlation between running time and holding power, as suggested earlier by
Miles? See Figure 7. The answer is generally yes, but the relationship is not strongly
linear. This lack of strong correlation is probably due to the multiple variables of the the
visitors, the videos, and the context, such as: the visitors’ interests, available time , social
interactions, and orientation; the video’s content, timing and location, and the exhibition’s
noise and available seating. As Miles has suggested, “(A)s with all communications, if the
message is of sufficient interest, or it the audience is sufficiently highly motivated, it is
possible to break all the rules and get away with it” (Miles 1989, p 250).

There was no correlation between attraction rates and holding power (Figure 8). Just
because they stop is no guarantee they’ll stay. “(T)he visitor is constantly deciding whether
to stay or to leave” (Alt, 1979).

Summary
Taken together, the 45 videos averaged an attraction rate of 32%. That is, roughly
speaking, around one third of the visitors were stopping to watch the videos. An attraction
rate of more than 60% was exceptional. High attraction percentages seemed to be
associated with paid admission, linear presentations, seating, and strong human-interest
stories, but there is not enough data under each of these conditions to isolate the variables.
There was sufficient data to suggest that serious detractions included open floor plans
(exhibitions not separated by walls), competition with many other videos, and competing
with live animals (live animals always win).

The 45 videos averaged a holding power of .39. Thus, the average fraction of the program
that people watch was more than one-third of a video, but usually less than half. Although
a holding power of over .50 was not unusual (29% of the database were videos with scores
between .50 and .69), a holding power of more than .70 was exceptional. Higher holding
powers seem to be reflected by a slight bimodality to the holding time data, and the second
bump in the frequency distribution of a video’s time data may be a diagnostic indicator of
greater success than ones with an exponential curve of decreasing times.

Although many videos have a narrative construction with a beginning, middle, and end, it is
clear that once a video has attracted people’s attention, it does not always hold it. Visitors
are constantly tempted to move to another exhibit element, always looking for what’s next.
To hold visitors’ attention, a video has to keep motivating visitors to stay a little longer,
delaying their decision to leave. This seems to have been accomplished successfully in
videos with holding powers over .50, often by having a story line with evolving surprises
that build on one another both visually and verbally.

The average time spent by visitors watching a video in this database was 137 seconds or
under three minutes. Seventy-five percent of the videos in this database had average
holding times of less than two and a half minutes.

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Recommendations
How long should a video be? Given that the average time spent by visitors in the whole
exhibition is often less than 20 minutes, expecting visitors to stay at even a 3 minute video
is asking a lot. If a video needs to be longer than three minutes, it should definitely be an
optional activity, not one that exhibit developers are counting on the majority of the visitors
to use.

When planning videos for an exhibition, exhibit developers should keep in mind that most
people are not inclined to watch them all the way through unless it motivates them strongly
enough to quit thinking about leaving. Videos located in the middle or towards the end can
provide a resting place, a wayside for a break from looking and reading, whereas videos at
the beginning may seem like a roadblock or a diversion when visitors are eager to get
inside. We should not blithely assume that every introductory video will be watched
thoroughly by the majority of visitors. This has serious implications for introductory videos
that are expected to teach visitors concepts and vocabulary necessary to understand the
rest of the exhibits or a main message that ties everything together.

We can reflect on these data and think more deeply about communicating our intents about
videos to visitors--how audiovisuals fit within the exhibition’s structure, who they are for,
how and why visitors should take the time to watch them. Using these data as a guideline
for what’s out there, we can begin to think more clearly about determining what levels of
use indicate the greatest level of success as measured by visitors’ attention paid to them.
In the case of Women’s Health, the video programming was very clear in its intent; the
videos were well-integrated with other exhibit modalities, and orientation was given for
each video’s content and running times. They were professionally produced, and seating
was provided. Given the multiple sight and sound distractions of an open floor plan,
however, the attracting and holding power expectations must be lower than in a more
secluded or linear exhibition layout.

To get the most bang for the video buck, shouldn’t videos be attractive to the majority of
the audience and shouldn’t they hold the majority of the visitors’ attention all the way
through? If a video met these two criteria, it would have an attraction rate of more than
50% and a holding power of .50 or more, such as Neferteri, Amber, and Postal Patrons.
Even if some videos are not meant for the general audience, shouldn’t the majority of self-
selected visitors who do choose to stop should stay to see it all? The data presented here
suggests that many videos are far from reaching these figures. Visitors, in general, seem
reluctant to commit to stopping and watching a video, and to increase the figures, videos
need to be far more compelling and engaging. Adding formative evaluation to the video
development process would add time and expense to video costs, but the costs may be far
outweighed by greater success rates.

The database presented here builds on the data and conclusions presented by Miles, but it
is a long way from being a systematic collection of videos that represent the many different
variables to be studied, e.g., location, length, seating, use of sound, content and structure.
It would be very if museums that conduct summative evaluations could routinely measure
attracting power and holding times and publish the running times and holding power of
their videos. Highly successful ones may have some interesting things in common, beyond
a paying and/or trapped audience.

To help visitors choose to watch videos (be attracted) and stay for the whole thing (hold
attention, if appropriate) we should always let people know what each video is about by
having a short introductory label next to the door or screen, saying who it is for, how long it
is, and how it’s structured. Videos should be located where visitors can step out of the

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mainstream of traffic and sit down, especially if the video is more than three minutes long.
Long videos or multisegment videos might benefit from being broken into shorter, single
stories and set off by themselves. By offering better orientation up front, more visitors will
be able to make the right choice for themselves; and, by making short programs for broad
audiences, the resulting data might show more visitors watching more videos more
completely.

References
Alt, M. 1979. Improving audiovisual presentations. Curator 22/2, 85-95.

Giusti, E. 1996. Amber: Window to the Past, Summative Evaluation. American Museum of
Natural History.

Institutional Studies Office, Smithsonian Institution. 1995. An Assessment of the Science

in American Life Exhibition.

Korenic, M. and A. Young. 1989. Rain Forest: Exploring Life on Earth Summative
Evaluation. Milwaukee Public Museum.

Menninger, M. 1993. In the Tomb of Nefertari: Conservation of the Wall Paintings. The J.
Paul Getty Museum.

Miles, R. S. 1989. Audiovisuals, a suitable case for treatment. in Visitor Studies: Theory,
Research, and Practice. Vol. 2. Center for Social Design, Jacksonville, Alabama, 245-251.

Office of Policy & Analysis, Smithsonian Institution. 2001. Studies of Visitors at The
American Presidency.

Post, M. 2001. Amazon Rising introductory video timing study. Shedd Aquarium.

Saunders, C. Presentation at the Society of Environmental Graphic Artists meeting at

Brookfield Zoo, January 2001.

Serrell & Associates. 1994. Summary of Evaluation Studies of Messages from the
Wilderness. Field Museum of Natural History.

Serrell & Associates. 1993. Evaluation of the Underwater Viewing Gallery. Shedd Aquarium

Serrell & Associates, 1994. Summative Evaluation of Binding the Nation and Customers
and Communities at the National Postal Museum.

Serrell, B. 1998. Paying Attention: Visitors and Museum Exhibitions. American Association
of Museums. 234 pages.

Serrell, B. and I. Sulston. 2001. “In Search of the Elusive Bimodal Distribution,” Visitor
Studies Today, Summer 2001, Volume IV, Issue 2.

Serrell, B., S. Ratcliffe and M. Prager. 2001. Women’s Health Video Evaluation. Maryland
Science Center.

Thanks to Margie Prager, Roger Miles, Selma Thomas, Zahava Doering, Tim Sullivan, and
Linda Wilson for their data and comments on the manuscript.

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