A recent research article published in Curator: The Museum Journal examines nearly a century of studies on visitor path choice and wayfinding.
In Understanding Visitor Path Choice and Enhancing Wayfinding in Museums: A Critical Review of a Century of Research, author Gareth Davey evaluates how layout, exhibit placement, exits, and visitor intent influence the paths visitors take. It’s quite an in-depth review, so we’ve parsed it for a few of the big-picture points. We recommend reading the review in full to explore this topic in greater detail.
Placement and visibility matter more than exhibit appeal
Turns out exhibit placement is huge. Davey first points to Arthur Melton’s 1930s experiments, which found that visitors consistently gravitated toward exhibits closer to entrances or along their first route through a gallery, even when other objects were just as appealing.
That pattern holds when exhibit conditions change. In one case, a large mechanical exhibit drew visitors toward one side of a gallery only when it was operating. When the motion stopped, visitors reverted to other routes. Other studies found that big, busy exhibits tended to attract visitors just by being hard to miss.
Davey notes that these effects appear repeatedly across different types of museums, including art museums, science centers, zoos, and aquariums.
Exits are like magnets
Exits are a longtime, consistent influence on visitor movement. Melton coined the term “exit attraction,” meaning visitors tend to leave through the first exit they encounter. He also found that the closer an exit was to a visitor, the stronger its pull. Later studies observed similar behavior, reinforcing that exits compete with exhibits for attention and affect how thoroughly galleries are explored.
Right-turn bias has been overgeneralized
Davey revisits the long-standing idea that visitors naturally turn right when entering galleries. While this pattern appeared in some early, very controlled studies, later research shows that it’s unreliable in real museum environments. It may hold true in certain highly symmetrical contexts, but Davey cautions that treating right-turn behavior as a universal rule can lead to poor design decisions.
Visitors choose paths based on purpose
Because of work by John Falk and others, we know visitors’ different priorities influence how they move. Consider Falk’s five visitor identity types as a useful way to understand the differences:
- Professional or hobbyist visitors want fast routes to specific content.
- Explorers wander until something grabs them.
- Facilitators, like parents or companions, move based on the needs of their party, not displays.
- Experience-seekers typically follow prominent or well-known routes, especially early in a visit.
- Rechargers or spiritual pilgrims favor calm, intentional circulation.
Side note: Visitor identity models explain a lot, but they don’t cover every real-world behavior, especially when time pressure, anxiety, tourism habits, or personal quirks come into play. What percentage of your visitors are completionists, for example?
Wayfinding works best at decision points
Time and again, research shows that signage and instructions are most effective when placed at moments where visitors needed to make a choice, such as entrances, intersections, or gallery thresholds.
By contrast, signs placed deeper in galleries have little effect on route selection. In other words, it’s the timing and placement of information that matters more than how much information is offered.
Accessibility is still under-researched
Davey notes that despite the breadth of studies reviewed, there’s a significant lack of research focused on visitors with disabilities. While some work addresses assistive wayfinding tools, much of the literature overlooks how layout and navigation affect visitors with different physical, sensory, or cognitive needs. Accessible wayfinding, Davey argues, benefits all visitors.
In practice
There’s no tidy explanation for visitor movement. Research emphasizes that path choice results from interacting factors, including layout, visibility, exits, signage, and visitor intent. But the way those factors play out depends on your building, your exhibitions, and the types of visitors you tend to draw. Davey ultimately calls for museums to pay closer attention to how visitors actually move through their institutions and to recognize paths as part of the visitor experience, not just a means of getting from one exhibit to another.
Read the review in its entirety here: Understanding Visitor Path Choice and Enhancing Wayfinding in Museums: A Critical Review of a Century of Research. You’ll find critiques of efficiency-based movement models, biological and cultural explanations for path choice, and how overall museum layout influences visitor movement.
