The museum learning experience through the visitors’ eyes: An eye tracking exploration of the physical context

Experiences always need to be designed with the visitor in mind. In our society, museums hold a prominent place for human learning and experiences. Museum experiences have become a sophisticated blend of spatial design, exhibit curation, and multimedia selection, shaping the overall physical context of the visitor’s experience. Driven by the question of how we can create effective visitor learning experiences in contemporary museums, a large-scale mobile eye tracking was conducted. Mobile eye tracking has recently entered tourism research as a novel method to study visitor behaviour in real-life environments and in a non-intrusive manner. The findings reveal that the physical context greatly influences the museum learning experience, and show significant differences in attention and engagement levels across the exhibition’s elements. The study adds insights into the relationship between visitors’ museum learning processes and the physical context and contributes to the model of contextual learning. Practical implications for museum experience design are offered with regards to spatial experience design and different visitor age segments.