Keep it Moving: Visitor Throughput Strategies
Managing the efficient and orderly movement of visitors is a critical factor in the success of your mobile outreach tour. Allowing your audience the time and space for meaningful engagement with your message needs to be balanced against the need to “keep it moving” so that your experience can be appreciated by an appropriate number of visitors.
Consider the following issues when developing your mobile tour to optimize your flow of visitors through your experience:
Explore both visitor-led spaces and controlled-flow experiences. Some mobile environments have a carefully controlled visitor flow, while others allow visitors to meander through open spaces that let your audience choose what part of the experience to engage next. Controlled visitor experiences often provided for a higher level of visitor throughput, while those that allow visitors to choose their own paths often result in slower visitor process through the space.
Carefully analyze the effects media experiences have on visitor flow. While engaging audio and video content can provide a richer, more meaningful visitor experience, these spaces can often result in visitor backups that reduce overall throughput. If media experiences are critical to your visitor experience, consider limiting run time to 90 seconds per video, and provide a spatial layout that allows visitors to “move on” to other elements if backlogs occur.
Create interactive experiences with user time limits. Digital interactive experiences, particularly those with social networking connections be powerful tools to capture the attention of visitors and explore complex messaging content. During the design of these experiences, consider adding a time limiting factor to prevent a few visitors from monopolizing the activity, and causing visitor back up. If possible, use standing, rather than sitting visitor spaces for digital interactive activities to prevent visitors from “camping out” within the experience.
