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

what everyone would do

The standard fix for a limited-capacity attraction was improving physical queue management, more staff, better line design, to make the line move faster, treating the wait as a throughput problem to optimize rather than something that could be eliminated entirely.

what they saw

MONA and Art Processors saw that faster queue management could shorten the wait but couldn't eliminate its fundamental cost, standing doing nothing for the entire duration, meaning the real problem wasn't the line's speed, it was that visitors were forced into dead time with nothing else to do. Rather than trying to make the physical line move faster, the fix was making the physical line unnecessary altogether, tracking a visitor's real-time location anywhere in the museum and only summoning them to the exhibit exactly when it was their turn, letting the wait happen inside something they were already doing instead of standing still.

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.

why it works

Estimating wait time based on each visitor's actual location and movement, and deliberately delaying the summons notification if someone was mid-meal at the café, meant the system converted what would have been pure dead time into time visitors spent doing things they'd already chosen to do, eating, drinking, viewing other exhibits, rather than forcing them to interrupt an activity to stand in a line. Because the system could pull nearby visitors ahead of farther-away ones to keep the exhibit continuously filled, it maintained the same or better throughput a physical queue would provide while removing the actual cost visitors experienced, the feeling of wasted, idle time. This is why in its first year the Queuer saved visitors a combined total of over 1,798 days of what would otherwise have been standing in physical queue lines, a result achieved not by making anyone wait less in total, but by making the same amount of waiting cost visitors nothing they actually valued.

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.

where it breaks

The mechanism depends on visitors actually having other activities available to fill the wait time with, a venue with nothing else for visitors to do while waiting would gain little from location-aware notification since there'd be no alternative activity to redirect the dead time into. It also depends on having reliable, granular real-time location tracking throughout the venue, a system without accurate positioning data couldn't estimate wait times or deliver notifications precisely enough to actually replace a physical line without risking visitors missing their turn or arriving too early. And this approach requires visitors to actually carry and monitor a connected device throughout their visit, a population without smartphone access or willingness to use the venue's app would need the traditional physical queue as a fallback, meaning the virtual system's benefit scales with how universally visitors adopt and rely on the notification mechanism rather than defaulting back to standing in line out of habit or distrust.

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. [1]Waiting game: How we killed off queues at MonaArt Processors, 2018artprocessors.net
2. [2]Why MONA went mobile: The technology behind Hobart's Museum of Old and New ArtComputerworld, 2018computerworld.com

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