The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Reading Online Museum Reviews

If you work at a science museum, nature center, zoo, etc. I recommend reading through the reviews your guests post online.  Be prepared for both the positive, the negative, and the strange.

Travel advice sites like Trip Advisor and Google Reviews are great places to learn about what your visitors are really thinking.  Sure, every place has a comment card or book for visitors to put there thoughts, but my experience with these is that visitor's leave very limited constructive feedback.  Usually people only scribble off a few words like "Awesome, Awesome, Awesome" (well I guess that's one word three times) or they write long angry messages that make their visit seem so dramatically terrible that it is hard to take them seriously.

Online reviewers can sometimes be as extreme as the people who write out the long angry letters, but most online accounts seem written by people who want to honestly share what they experienced, and they often give examples of the good and bad.  Reading details about their experiences can be really helpful, but sometimes their examples can be tricky too.  Two reviewers might mention the same thing, but one uses it as a positive example and the other uses it as a negative one.

Here is what I mean:

Positive:  "It was great to go to a zoo that was affordable and walk-able in a couple hours.  What a perfect trip for an afternoon."
Negative:  This zoo is so small that I walked the whole thing in 2 hours.  Don't waste your time or money on this.  There is a bigger zoo a couple hours from here. Go there instead.  I'll never support this zoo again."

Positive:  "Museum is located downtown, so there was plenty of on-street parking with credit card friendly meters and lots of places to eat for lunch.  The kids loved all the hands-on exhibits, and I loved reading all the accompanying explanations.  What a great museum for all ages."
Negative: "Museum is located downtown, so of course parking is a nightmare.  Also, the museum doesn't have a real cafe, only vending machines so you have to leave the museum if you want to eat.  Also, all the exhibits seemed too old for the kids at the museum, because they seemed to be running around and grabbing everything."

These are just two examples of many more that I could give.  So if reviews are so contradictory, how do you interpret them.  When I read them, what pops out is the expectations of the reviewers.  It reminds me of the saying how different all our perceptions are.  I think it is impossible to please everyone, and especially hard to please someone who is having a no good, horrible, terrible, very bad day.  But as museum staff, we can use these reviews to see if there is anything we could be doing to better align peoples expectations with what they can actually experience.

We need to be careful about how we word our advertisements and program descriptions.  I once made the mistake of describing a program I was giving as good for "all ages."  Of course, after the show a mother came up to me disappointed because she thought it wasn't good for her 3 year old.  She was right, and I'll never make that mistake again.

As an educator I think my opportunities to help with this mostly come from listening to visitors and helping them understand why things are the way they are.  I try to make visitors comfortable enough to share their positive and negative criticisms and express my appreciation when they do.  And, if it is appropriate, I try to get across just how much our staff and volunteers care about what we do and how hard we work to create a safe and enjoyable learning experience for our visitors.

Oh, and one more way that reading online reviews of museums can be helpful to you is to read reviews of other museums.  Do visitors say the same things about the other museums as they do about yours?  Is your museum missing something everyone liked at the other one?

If you find any particularly interesting online museum reviews, I'd love to see them linked to or posted on here.