People visit the museum and lack knowledge about things, due to which they face problems. So, Museum audio guide equipment is there to guide people about the context behind that image. Here’s how an audio guide helps you in making exhibitions informative and worth going to.
The rise of the audio guide
Audio guides indeed aren’t new equipment in the museum. This pre-recording commentary idea has been there for years and helps the visitors with additional information and context. Moreover, these audio guides are used by hundreds of museum visitors each year. Still, there is much innovative technology present in a new museum audio guide equipment.
The Audio Guide is a long-lasting service at the museum, with over several years of audio communications and messages engaging 250,000 users annually. Therefore, audio guides are ideal for resolving language barriers or helping people learn and understand things without reading signs and information on different boards and places. It helps in understanding nine major foreign languages and is beneficial for special exhibition tours. In September 2013, there was a rebirth f the audio guide with a redesigned interface and repackaged content. It offers a new chance for us to take a more deliberate look at the Audio Guide.
Moreover, the guide retains track of what the guest understands and creates a digital memento from the multiple objects exhibited in the museum’s corridors. They can then guide themselves to this reminder once the tour is over – an extra touch that allows guests to recall and revisit them.
What are the advantages of having audio guides in a museum?
First and primary, the audio guide is a source of interpretation. Sound helps direct them in their engagement with the exhibition and is one of the most potent means of catching the visitors’ attention. Audiovisual aid content can help you understand things better, but it does not distract you from the exhibition itself.
The museum audio guide equipment’s primary purpose is to provide the visitor good experience. Therefore, it is a tool that allows the visitor to make the most of the visit, integrate well into the display, and tell exciting stories. Particularly for the museums we have been working with, which appeal to a large global audience, the guide will be the primary communication tool and make the gallery accessible.
Moreover, the guides can help visitors self-guided with them and make the tour more convenient for them. Other than tours nowadays, they are famous for numerous excursions and visit. Modern audio systems show how visitors use the display, extending from retention time and language delivery to path analysis. Also, it allows museums to monitor the visitor experience and expectations without additional costs continuously.
Further, these audio guides make the experience positive and positively impact the visitor and the management of the museum. Also, it is highly cost-effective as it is reasonable and helps in interpretation at a lower cost than the same quantity of guided tours would have experienced. The guide is involved in the ticket price or borrowed out separately; it pays its asset costs. Some of the benefits are listed below:
1. Audio guides and tours bid your visitors flexibility. People who go to museums need the flexibility to travel at their own pace, which is not imaginable in accompanied tours. Audio guides provide individuals freedom and visit museums whenever they want.
2. They break down linguistic barriers. It makes museum tours more interesting for locals and does not know many different languages much.
3. They help in your exhibition. Audio tours offer visitors an immersive involvement that lets people involve more with art rather than distract them from it. Kids, most suggestively, love how sound invigorates up their museum trips.
4. They make the tour enjoyable as well as informative at the same time. A well-made audio tour can capture the mind of your viewers as you weave captivating tales that inform.
5. They keep guests safe and cultivated during the pandemic. These devices allow visitors to your exhibit to exercise secure distancing procedures while letting them hear each display detail. The guides remove the need for gathering together in groups. Your audio tour system can also help you collect visitor data to express which exhibitions get the most rush-hour traffic. You can use that info or data to help you craft the best routes for your museum.
6. They allow visually-impaired individuals to enjoy art. Audio tours provide visual images of exhibits that can give blind or partially-sighted individuals a rich art understanding, letting them get as much out of an official visit as a seeing person.
Is the Audio Guide Easy to Understand and Use?
The Audio Guide is comprehensive and ambitious for visitors, which can be good. Still, some factors cause people difficulties understanding things and make it difficult to make informed choices about their experiences. For example, it is hard for staff adherents to give a solid and brief description of the Audio Guide to guests since there is so much to go over and clarify.
As a result, many guests fail to comprehend the factual scope of what the Audio Guide offers and can’t take full benefit of it. Mostly in usability testing, people face this problem. Though 76% of our visitors specified that they found the Audio Guide “very convenient and easy” to use, much of the study data sets that the vast number of visitors could only access a small serving of what it had to offer. It drove us to have a deeper understanding of the thing, especially in things people face problems to understand and have the whole experience.
So how do you decrease the misperception while keeping the complexity and richness of an exhibition that visitors value? If you want to make a practical museum tour, you need to reduce the option and rearrange the way groups of tours. Second, we’re making variations to how the Audio Guide presents in the museum’s physical space by simplifying the numbering system and decreasing the visual clutter. It helps in fulfilling visitors’ precise needs.
Claire Smith has been working in the field of content management for a few years. She just loves reading and writing about different topics.