Elevating the Visitor Experience Through In-Depth Storytelling

When visitors come to your museum or gallery, there’s no doubt that your objective is to ensure they are engaged, immersed in the exhibits and offerings. Your wish is that they leave feeling excited about what they saw, and will have an incentive to tell others about it, and to return for your next exhibit.

A mobile app can be one of the most effective and affordable ways to engage your visitors. And it can be used to go far beyond a guided tour.

Certain mobile app platforms can help you to add context and flavour to everything available in person within your space. It can allow you to take visitor engagement to a more meaningful level through in-depth storytelling.

Using what we call the Experiences Module, you can create and share interlocked dynamic content–meaning, content that is unlocked as the user goes through the “experience” by accessing each linked piece of content.

I like to consider the Experiences module the ultimate multi-media storytelling tool for your museum or gallery mobile app. One of my favourite examples of how this module can be used comes out of the Polygon Gallery, an art gallery in North Vancouver. The Polygon Gallery used the Experiences module to enhance their existing mobile app by creating THE POLYGON OUTSIDE–the Gallery’s platform for newly-commissioned digital art projects.

THE POLYGON OUTSIDE guides a visitor on their journey as they encounter interactive audio-visual projects animating sites along the North Shore Spirit Trail. As a visitor approaches a specific work, they can access more in-depth information about each work and receive a unique perspective on the history of the particular site.

For example, on a guided journey, a visitor might encounter a piece of art and then via the app, be able to access an interview with the artist and images of the artwork as it was created. Then, more content could be unlocked, including a map of the area or old images of what the site looked like in the past.

Even visitors who can’t make it physically to the North Shore Spirit Trail can experience the works of art and the incredible stories that go along with each from their phones.

While it takes a bit of creativity and outside-the-box thinking to truly maximize the Experiences module’s potential, you can use it to share rich information through videos, text, audio, 3D images, maps, and more.

The possibilities are endless.

The Info Grove team is happy to explore the potential for using the Experiences module to bring it to life for your museum or gallery’s mobile app. If you have an idea, get in touch and let’s talk about it. We love an opportunity to get creative with what is possible using the Info Grove platform.

Karim Mansour is an Inside Sales Representative at 14 Oranges, the creators of the Info Grove platform.

Mobile Apps for Museums and Galleries