I’ve got to point people’s attention to this excellent blog post from Colleen Dilenschneider. Colleen works for a US market research firm called Impacts. They have a couple of hundred visitor facing clients, including for example, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and they combine their data from all the research to produce the National Awareness, Attitude & Usage Study, which is informed by on-site interviews, randomly selected telephone interviews and an on-line component. So though its commercial market research, and not academically peer reviewed, the approach seems to be pretty robust. I’ve been looking for some hard numbers about the benefit (or otherwise) of mobile device interpretation, not just for my research (and my talk next week), but also for work. It was a work colleague who pointed me to post, but I’ll happy include some of the data in next week’s presentation.
I’ll let you read it for yourself. Some if it is not so surprising, when it offers some numbers to support what has already been reported anecdotally. For example, that people are more likely to use the place’s website, social media and review sites to plan a visit, than an institution’s app, or that people are more likely to use social media than an app when they are on-site (old readers will be familiar with my usual rant on this subject, now available in print 🙂 ).
But there’s one chart I want to draw out, which makes two key points (both important enough for Dilenschneider to use bold text):
People who use mobile applications onsite do not report significantly higher satisfaction rates than those who do not.
and
People who use social media or mobile web while they visit a cultural organization have a more satisfying overall experience than people who don’t use social media or mobile web during their visit.
She illustrates both points with the same graph.
All of which adds weight to the argument that institutions like the one I work for should prioritize installation of free, easy to log on to, pervasive wifi over the commissioning of expensive, unused apps, and direct content development efforts towards the mobile web, in the knowledge that even then, users may prefer to publish out from a place, rather than read the content that you’ve created.
Some places get it.
The Interpretation Game 