English
Dansk
DeutschWhat we have built, and how we checked it.
Guides for more than 50 museums and heritage sites – art museums, an archaeological city, a seventeenth-century warship, a codebreaking estate, a working farmstead – and the discipline behind every sentence Henry speaks.
The scale it already runs at.
50+
Museums and heritage sites
10,000+
Works, each with its own record
34,000+
Sources behind them
2,000+
People with a biography
Every claim is weighed before a word is written.
Facts are gathered, then arbitrated against their sources one at a time, and an editorial pass goes looking for what slipped through. For Forum Romanum all 760 historical claims were arbitrated individually, and then a red team was set on the result to attack it.
It is built to catch exactly what an unchecked model gets wrong: an invented person, a date pulled from the wrong foreign source, a name that drifted – before a visitor hears it. The four layers, in order.
It corrects the internet
On one site the check overturned an attribution that is widely repeated online: the excavation had been led by someone other than the famous name usually credited with it.
It says when a thing is a copy
At another site the first thing the guide says, before anything else, is that the object in front of you is a full-size copy and the original is in the national museum.
It gives dates as ranges
Where the evidence spans a range, he says the range. Ancient casualty figures are attributed as ancient accounts, not repeated as modern fact.
Visitors interrupt a guide who talks too long.
In field testing, a long opening answer was cut short by the visitor in 56% of cases. So Henry’s first answer is now 60 to 80 words, by rule, in every guide we build. It is the kind of thing that only shows up when real people are standing in a real room, and it is now enforced by a test rather than left to a writer’s judgement.
MEUX is the standard for a meaningful museum visit. We built against it.
Researchers at Warwick and Oxford published it in 2023: a model for museum exhibition user experience. Not a checklist of features, but a description of what actually makes a visit meaningful to the person having it – and a hard standard to clear.
We built against MEUX, and we meet all of it but one — the shared family visit, which is on the roadmap.
The MEUX model was validated across 28 interviews, 272 staff surveys and 341 visitor surveys. One finding stands out in particular: what museum staff believed made a visit meaningful and what visitors themselves said in the tests diverged significantly.
King, E., Smith, M. P., Wilson, P. F., Stott, J.,
& Williams, M. A. (2023). Creating Meaningful Museums: A Model for Museum Exhibition
User Experience. Visitor Studies, 26:1, 59–81. Open access, CC BY 4.0, funded by the
AHRC.
Read the paper
See what AITourPilot could do for your museum.
Five minutes, and you will know.