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Visitor Use of Multitouch Tables in the Galleries

One of the questions within our research was whether having a table in the galleries impacts the amount of attention and the amount of time spent on other elements.

In each of the galleries we studied, the multitouch table was not the most ‘popular’ object in the gallery, that was always an element of the collection. For instance, in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, over 86% of the visitors spent time with the Stegomastodon jaw, and roughly 63% used the multitouch table.

The stay time in each of the galleries was longer for the table than any other object in the galleries, averaging about 2 minutes at each site. While we’ve observed longer stay times at other multitouch tables, those tables tend to have more extensive or directed interactives than the collections-based content on these tables.

	Visitor Use of Table	Median Time (mm:ss)	Exhibited Social Behavior
IPCC	40% (n=12)	1:52	25% (n=3)
Maxwell	72.4% (n=21)	2:30	66.7% (n=14)
NMMNHS	62.5% (n=20)	2:04	80% (n=16)