Strangers, Guests, or Clients? Visitor Experiences in Museums

ABSTRACT This article discusses how museums relate to their visitors. It introduces three interpretive categories to summarize the ways that museums view their visitors: as Strangers, Guests, or Clients. Strangers: This attitude arises when the museum maintains that its primary responsibility is to the collection and not to the public. Guests: From this point of view, the museum wants to “do good” for visitors primarily through “educational” activities. Clients: In this attitude the museum believes that its primary responsibility is to be accountable to the visitor. This article suggests that social trends will force museums to treat visitors as clients. Institutions will then acknowledge that visitors have needs, expectations, and wants that the museum is obligated to understand and meet. Also discussed are four major categories of experiences that individuals find most satisfying in museums: (1) Social experiences center on one or more other people, besides the visitor; (2) Object experiences give prominence to the artifact or the “real thing”; (3) Cognitive experiences emphasize the interpretive or intellectual aspects of the experience; and (4) Introspective experiences focus on the visitor's personal reflections, usually triggered by an object or a setting in the museum. The categories are based on empirical research conducted in different Smithsonian museums. The article concludes with a brief discussion of museum settings, or “servicescapes,” that support or detract from the experiences of visitors.