Museum Wayfinding Is Harder Than a Map
Why indoor navigation breaks in buildings, and what it actually takes to make a museum map a visitor can trust.
Survivor stories are brought to the forefront with a hugely successful web app.
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Years with Guru: 1
Partnership model: The Guide
“The audio guides allow visitors to customize their individual museum experience and deepen their knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, transforming teaching and learning in ways that weren’t possible before.”
The Holocaust Museum Los Angeles has a plethora of survivor stories that are critical to the onsite museum experience. With the pandemic, the institution closed for a long period and was granted permission to reopen very quickly. They needed a BYOD solution for their 600+ audio stories, and fast, with only six weeks until their post-lockdown reopening.
Guru Experience Co. proposed a solution that was simple, straightforward, user-friendly, and quickly deployed. Our web app was the ideal solution for this client, who did not need nor want any fancy bells and whistles — just beautiful storytelling delivered without a hitch.
The web app was branded with HMLA’s color scheme and logo to truly reflect the institution. It was made available in both English and Spanish, with multiple ways to access the content. The museum still had old stop numbers embedded in the exhibitions coordinated with audio, but also had new themed narrative content that needed to be organized accordingly in a linear fashion.
Whether a user likes to enter a number on a keypad or take a linear style audio tour, their web app accommodates both. And most importantly, we were able to successfully get it into users’ hands within a month for a successful reopening launch.
The visitor services team has been hugely successful in getting the audio tour into the hands of visitors. With how easy the web app is to access and use, the museum sees an average take-up rate of over 30%.
“From everyone here at Holocaust Museum LA, thank you for your Herculean efforts to get our audio guides up and running by today. YOU DID IT and we are SO GRATEFUL!”
— Lisa Barnet, Director of Operations
Revitalized tourism that summer brought exciting new visitor experience projects to draw inspiration — and a little envy — from. A few of the less conventional museum experiences we admired:
Behind the scenes of how we turn museum stories into interactive, accessible experiences - plus what we’re learning along the way
