What Makes A Museum Boring? Visitors Point To Two Opposite Problems

(Credit: © EdNurg - stock.adobe.com)

Another wall of text. Another room that offers too little explanation. For museum visitors, opposite experiences can lead to the same feeling: boredom.

A study examining boredom in museums found that visitors described both information overload and insufficient stimulation as sources of disengagement. Although boredom levels were generally low, more-bored visitors performed worse on a post-visit knowledge quiz. The gap was modest, but a new study in Scientific Reports hints that a dull visit may send people home with less.

A team led by Thomas Goetz at the University of Vienna surveyed and interviewed more than 1,200 visitors at two different Austrian museums: the small Sigmund Freud Museum and the sprawling Kunsthistorisches Museum, which the paper calls “one of the most significant art museums in the world.” The researchers wanted to know how often boredom shows up, what goes with it, and whether it relates to anything beyond a flat day.

Museum boredom has rarely been studied, perhaps because visitors choose to go and can roam freely. It turned out to be mild overall, but visitors named specific complaints, from walls of text to blank rooms, that museums have the power to change.

(Bored museum visitors are less likely to absorb information about the exhibits they’re seeing, unsurprisingly. (Photo by Una Laurencic)

Visitors Reported Low but Real Museum Boredom

Three studies ran between May 2023 and December 2024. Two were questionnaires handed to randomly approached visitors as they left, 968 at the Freud Museum and 261 at the art museum. Visitors rated 11 emotions, boredom among them, from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very strong). Ages ran from 18 to 91 and averaged about 40, with more women than men in both samples. Participants spoke German or English, and the researchers collected no data on race or ethnicity.

Interviews made up the third study, with 72 other Freud Museum visitors talking at a café table after their visit. Most lasted about 10 minutes, and the answers were sorted for recurring themes.

Boredom averaged 1.69 at the Freud Museum and 1.81 at the art museum, which the authors call low but above zero. Among seven negative emotions, boredom ranked third at the Freud Museum and second at the art museum, ahead of anger, nervousness, frustration, and disappointment in both. Despite the low average, some visitors rated their boredom at the maximum of 5.

(Too much text and bare rooms went with more boredom at two Vienna museums, and bored visitors scored lower on a quiz. (Image by StudyFinds)

Overwhelmed or Underwhelmed Visitors Reported More Museum Boredom

Visitors who said the visit was too challenging reported more boredom, and so did those who said it was not challenging enough. Researchers gauge links like these on a scale where 0 means no connection and 1 means a perfect match. Overall figures for these links, including the quiz and price results below, all landed between 0.18 and 0.35, which makes them modest.

On the overwhelmed side, nine of the 72 people mentioned having no set route through the museum, seven cited too much information, and six cited too much text. After an audio section, one visitor faced a large room with still more to read and said, “The boredom kept growing during my visit to the museum.” On the underwhelmed side, five mentioned bare design, five mentioned emptiness, and four mentioned videos where nothing else was happening. “The walls felt a bit barren, which made me somewhat underwhelmed,” said one.

Personal importance was part of the pattern too. Visitors who called the visit personally important reported less boredom. In the interviews, 15 cited a general interest in psychology or Freud, while seven said the visit held no personal value for them. One explained, “It just was sort of a recommendation.” Every link measured at both museums pointed the same direction, though several were stronger at the art museum.

Museum Boredom Tracked With Lower Quiz Scores at the Art Museum

Only the art museum survey tested learning. Visitors answered 10 multiple-choice questions about what they had just seen, such as which detail in the painting “The Tower of Babel” shows the building is unfinished (the unfinished floors). They also rated their own prior knowledge from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high).

Higher boredom went with lower quiz scores, and the link barely shrank after accounting for that self-rated prior knowledge. Bored visitors at both museums were also more likely to call the admission price too high.

This design cannot show which way the links run. Boredom may have led to poorer learning, disengaged visitors may have grown bored, or something else may have driven both. Visitors also often miss parts of an exhibition, so a wrong answer may reflect what a person never saw.

Goetz called museums “key venues for informal learning outside schools and universities” and said they “could cater more effectively to the diversity of their visitors,” using tools such as smartphone barcodes and routes of varying difficulty, from a short pocket tour to an in-depth one, without turning galleries into entertainment venues. None of those fixes was tested here.

A glazed look in front of a painting is not a character flaw. Many of the features tied to boredom are choices museums make, and the more bored visitors scored lower on the one quiz given. Museums that want people to leave knowing more have good reason to treat boredom as a design problem.