QR Codes: Alive and Well in the Museum?
By: Colin Brooks
Tags: Qr Code, Whitney Museum, Data Analysis, Museums, Apps

The author scanning a QR code in the Whitney’s museum guide.

I can’t tell if you QR codes are dead, undead, or if they never died in the first place, but I can tell you we’ve been trialing them at the Whitney Museum of American Art over the last year. Anecdotally, everybody familiar with what QR codes are seems to have an anecdote about them, but we wanted to determine more systematically whether or not they might be a useful tool for driving visitors into digital content while at the Museum, with any meaningful levels of utilization. And as it turns out, for us, QR codes are alive and well.

Connecting to the Mobile Guide

With our recently launched Mobile Guide one of our goals has been to get more people engaging with the experience on their own devices. To achieve that goal, we have to get visitors to open up a URL on their phone. That may sound small, but even little barriers can seriously affect take-up rates, as evidenced by the increasingly widespread death of the museum app (see: The Met, Tate, Guggenheim, etc.), in no small part due to the need to download what will for most visitors be a one-off experience. And while we can shorten the URL to something generally easy to read and type (whitney.org/guide), not all visitors are adept screen-typers, and this might be just enough to put them off if they didn’t already consider themselves “audio guide people”. Enter QR codes.

iOS 11 and a better QR experience

Historically, one of the biggest annoyances of QR codes has been the need to download an app just to read the codes, which could then open other apps or websites. Many Android phones have built in readers, but with our visitors skewing heavily towards the iPhone and the difficulties of messaging around different models of devices, that wasn’t particularly useful for us. With the release of iOS 11 in 2017 however, iPhones gained native QR scanning abilities in the camera app, opening up the viability of QR as a part of our digital strategy.

The benefit to being built-in to the native camera meant that nearly all of our visitors with smartphones would have a device that could seamlessly scan and open a URL to our Mobile Guide experience, without having to type anything in. For less tech-savvy visitors in particular, this is extremely useful, because even if they don’t know they have a reader in their camera, staff can reliably direct them to it faster than they can type in a URL, which can be subject to typos or other mistakes.

Starting the trial

Knowing that a significant portion of the museum’s visitors would at least technically be able to scan QR codes, we started placing the codes in a number of places throughout the building. Every QR code we placed led into our Mobile Guide, but the URLs were built slightly differently in each case so we could track a) the number of total QR scans and b) know which placements were the most effective. We did this by adding a unique query parameter to each QR code URL that would be picked up by our Google Analytics after the code was accessed.

Gradually we rolled out QR codes in a number of locations across the museum. Those locations and their numbers of respective scans between Nov 2018 and May 2019 are listed below.

The backside of a standard Whitney Museum ticket.

Tickets

4,169 scans

An inside page of the Whitney’s museum guide containing a callout for the Mobile Guide and a QR code.

Museum guides

4,110 scans