In 2010 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "The Museum is Watching You," detailing how evaluation staff spend their time observing visitors interacting with exhibitions. This process is driven by museums wanting to know that their investments in exhibitions and programs have been well spent, both in terms of audience engagement and increases in traffic.

Recently, The New York Times broke a story about a number of retail stores that are either experimenting with or actively using technology that uses your phone's Wi-Fi signal to track your movements around their store. Nordstrom, the store that the New York Times focuses on (although it's not the only one doing this) installed sensors that scan for smartphones with Wi-Fi turned on. The sensors make note of each device's unique numerical address and use it to identify and follow the device (and you) as it moves about. From this, the story can determine how frequently you visit, which departments you got to when in the store, and how long you stay both in each department and in the store itself.

In other words, by detecting the devices that most of us carry, museums could collect not only the information that those museum staff observed, but much more of it and more systematically. Indeed data could be captured for every minute the museum is open, providing a much more complete picture of where and how the visitor uses your museum. More broadly the use of mobile phones for visitor tracking in museums and galleries can:

• Review the sequence of routes followed, and the percentage of the most popular
• Identify the total time spent in the museum or gallery
• Identify the time spent at each stop along the way (i.e. dwell time)
• Identify whether the mobile phone owner has visited before, and if so, how many times, and the average gap between visits
• Identify where the phone is registered, thus providing a snapshot profile for both domestic and international visitors

So the question is: Why hasn't the art museum community-a group no less interested in the movements of our visitors-taken up this challenge and sought ways to collect, digitally, user-specific data? Sure, there are some financial hurdles to buying and installing the equipment. But ultimately I think the challenge isn't the tracking itself. Rather, the challenge is in interpreting and acting on the data-and I suspect that too many museums would be afraid of what the data from such comprehensive tracking would tell us. What if you realized that your permanent collection was clearly under utilized in its current form? What if the data told you that visitors were confused, disappointed, or disaffected by exhibitions and left rapidly? Would you change the way in which your museum presented its content?

Something tells me that Macy's and Nordstrom doesn't track user actions to "appreciate" their users' interests. They do it to be more effective retailers: they do it to sell more stuff. No doubt good museum operations officers know how much specific exhibitions and installations cost in maintenance and disposables. Good marketing directors know that there's a direct relationship between number of visits and likeliness to buy or renew a membership. But these are "truisms" based on experience and recurring (but limited) data points, rather than facts based on a consistent stream of data.

I hope museums will seek ways to move towards the cutting edge of visitor data collection, an area that has had a dramatic impact on everything from retail experiences to places like Disney World. Tracking the data can make our field more successful, something that seems like an imperative. And knowing the value of different exhibitions and programs does not have to discourage museums from pursuing the unpopular, but rather support an argument that a mix and balance of activities-to meet a diverse range of visitors-is essential.

If we can really start to listen to visitor feedback and eventually, the tracked data, there are real financial and visitor rewards to be realized. I only ask that, unlike retail environments, we offer our visitors the opportunity to "opt in" to the process. (This NPR piece highlights the importance of consent in the currently underregulated world of smartphone tracking.)  

Presented clearly, I suspect that most people would be happy to help the museum gather data that would ultimately make the experience better for all.

Chris Anagnos
Executive Director