#425 2017 · Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart (MONA) · Museums / visitor experienceattack-invisible-cost
MONA didn't try to make the line for its most popular exhibit move faster — it made sure visitors were never standing in one at all.
the problem
a limited-capacity attraction creates unavoidable waiting, and the standard fix (a faster-moving physical line) still wastes visitors' time as pure dead time
background
Museum exhibits with strictly limited-capacity viewing rooms create an unavoidable bottleneck: only so many visitors can be inside at once, and the standard solution — a physical queue — forces visitors to stand doing nothing for the entire wait, turning what should be a highlight of the visit into its most frustrating part. Faster-moving queue management (more staff, better line design) can shorten the wait but can't eliminate the fundamental cost of standing in a line with nothing else to do.
MONA, working with experience design firm Art Processors, reframed the problem: rather than trying to make the line itself move faster, they aimed to make the physical line unnecessary altogether by tracking a visitor's real-time position anywhere in the museum and only summoning them to the exhibit exactly when it was their turn.
the move
MONA's app-based 'Queuer' system, part of its 'The O' visitor app, placed guests into a virtual queue for high-demand exhibits without requiring them to stand anywhere — it estimated wait time based on each visitor's actual location and movement through the museum, could pull nearby visitors ahead of farther-away ones to keep the exhibit continuously filled, and deliberately delayed the summons notification if a visitor was mid-meal at the museum café or bar, only pinging them once they'd finished eating and resumed exploring.
the payoff
In its first year of operation, the Queuer saved visitors a combined total of over 1,798 days of what would otherwise have been time spent standing in physical queue lines, converting that wait time into time visitors spent doing things they'd already chosen to do — eating, drinking, viewing other exhibits — instead of standing still.
what came after
MONA's Queuer is cited in museum and visitor-experience design as a model for replacing physical waiting with location-aware virtual queuing that respects what a visitor is already doing, and similar systems — including later projects by the same design team at other major museums — have since adopted the same 'don't interrupt an activity to summon someone' logic as standard practice for high-demand attraction management.
references
- [1]Waiting game: How we killed off queues at MonaArt Processors, 2018artprocessors.net
- [2]Why MONA went mobile: The technology behind Hobart's Museum of Old and New ArtComputerworld, 2018computerworld.com