Crown Cultures is underpinned by the Museum Exhibit User Experience (MEUX, pronounced ‘muse’) Toolkit. The Toolkit is a comprehensive resource for cultural sector professionals, providing a means to conceptualise, evaluate, and develop visitor experiences.
The Toolkit is all about exploring the interaction that occurs between museums and their visitors at exhibits and other activities.
The Museum Exhibit User Experience Toolkit: A Practitioner’s Guide to Conceptualising Evaluating and Developing Visitor Centred Exhibits and Exhibitions will be published by Routledge in Autumn 2026.
What is the museum-visitor interaction?
The museum-visitor interaction is all about how visitors engage with exhibits in museums, and focuses on the specific relationship between visitor and exhibit. This interaction, at its most basic level, involves the following steps:
The museum presents tangible material to visitors in an exhibits
such as narrative, objects, videos, and interactives
The visitor perceives this material as a series of intangible qualities
such as interesting, engaging, memorable, or inspiring
These perceived qualities are mediated by the visitor’s identity, which they bring to the museum
such as their gender, age, ethnicity, prior knowledge, experiences, and motivations
This results in a series of outcomes for the visitors
such as learning, enjoyment, improved confidence, belonging, and a desire to learn more
The MEUX Toolkit is underpinned by this theory, which is then translated into specific exhibits in real museum settings. It caters for an unlimited variety of different exhibits, which can include different material, different intangible qualities, different visitors, and different visitor outcomes. Despite their variety, all exhibits follow this same framework.
The museum–visitor interaction is understood from two different perspectives: the museum perspective, and the visitor perspective. For the museum, the interaction is what the museum intends the visitor experience to be. For the visitors, the interaction is what actually happens at the exhibit. The two perspectives may or may not align.
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A theoretical framework which conceptualises museum-visitor interactions at exhibits, from both the museum perspective and the visitor perspective.
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A series of standardised evaluation instruments used to collect information on museum-visitor interactions at exhibits.
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A process of using quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques to reconstruct the museum-visitor interaction from the perspective of museum visitors, which is then compared to the museum’s intentions for the interaction, to identify success.
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A process of exhibition development which utilises previously collected evaluation data in order to develop new museum-visitor interactions.
What does the Toolkit include?
The MEUX Toolkit is a resource to conceptualise, evaluate, and develop different museum-visitor interactions.
The MEUX Toolkit is made up of:
By conceptualising exhibits on the same framework, evaluation is a standardised process which allows visitors to describe exhibits back to the museum. These descriptions can be utilised in the development of new exhibits, with new ideas being benchmarked against previous visitor experiences. By continuously measuring different interactions, the MEUX Toolkit seeks to close the gap between museum intentions and actual visitor experiences.
Where can I learn more?
Ellie has published multiple research papers on the development of the MEUX Toolkit, alongside other papers about her work within the heritage sector. Click on the links below for more information.
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