When you walk through a museum, the path you take feels natural — guided by curiosity, aesthetics, and maybe a helpful app. But behind the scenes, that journey is shaped by decisions about layout and design that can make or break your experience. Research by Abhishek Deshmane, assistant professor of operations management, reveals how data-driven models can help cultural institutions — and other experience-based businesses — optimize these layouts to boost engagement.
Museums, like retailers and theme parks, have to consider how they should arrange their offerings to create the most engaging experience. Traditionally, curators organize exhibits by theme or chronology. But visitors rarely follow the intended order. Instead, they carve their own paths—sometimes skipping masterpieces or creating congestion around popular works.
For museums around the world, this research means more than operational efficiency. It’s about deepening the visitor experience. Subtle tweaks to layout and app design can make visits more rewarding, reduce congestion, and expose audiences to a broader range of works.
Listen as Deshmane examines how he and his co-authors partnered with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to tackle this challenge. Using data from 1.5 million visitors and their interactions with the museum’s multimedia guide, they built a model to predict how layout influences visitor movement. Through three years of field experiments in the museum, they generated insights that drove a €1 million redesign of the audio guide system that has now impacted 3,500 daily visitors.
In a world where experiences compete for attention, data-driven design could be the difference between a quick visit and a lasting memory.
