The Audio-Guide Visitors Keep

Traditional audio-guide devices consume valuable resources in a museum.

They must be repaired, charged and kept clean.

They also need to be picked up at the end of the tour.

To ensure that they are returned, the visitor usually has to leave cash or a personal ID as deposit, with all the potential risk to security and data protection that this poses to the museum, to say nothing of the hassle for the visitor.

Nubart audioguide cards are tangible like conventional equipment, but they don't need any maintenance.

Since visitors can keep them, they don’t require a deposit nor anti-theft protection to be lent out.

They work as a non-transferable key that allows an easy and quick access to the multilingual content directly from the visitor’s smartphone.

They are also attractive and a nice collectible souvenir.

Museums moving on from traditional devices tend to consider native apps as an alternative to conventional audio-guides.

However, development of an app is expensive. Apps need to be developed at least twice (iPhone and Android), are generally not flexible for content changes and require constant maintenance and costly updates.

Visitors often dislike consuming memory on their smartphones to install an app that they will probably only use once.

The consequence is a very low download rate (around 1 %) and hardly any ROI for the museum.

Nubart cards can be activated instantly from any type of smartphone (iPhone, Android, Windows…), even from old models. No updates required!

Nubart doesn't consume the device's memory, since the digital content is streamed. We can also offer an offline solution for special cases.

If your museum is facing production of an audio-guide for the first time, you may feel overwhelmed by the many things you need to take into account.

How to write an appropriate script for an audio-guide? How many tracks should your audio-guide have? How long should they be?

But also: how to find a reliable and professional translator into Chinese? Or who could make a professional voice over for your Japanese visitors?

Many IT companies will offer you a technical solution (apps or similar), but will leave you alone with all content-related trouble. Nubart works with proven experts with humanities and arts backgrounds in all these areas, so we can offer you both: innovative audio-guide technology and first-class content production.

We collaborate with you at every step, from the script until the final presentation of the digital content.

Of course, we can also integrate in our system the content that you already have.

You can check out our work schedule and method here.

Museums know how important visitors evaluation is. But it is difficult to gather the kind of data you need to research your visitors.

Nubart cards are not only an innovative audio-guide which provide a multilingual self-guided tour to your audience, but also an ideal data collector. Nubart gathers usage and behavioral data from your visitors' smartphones anonymously and never violating their privacy. (See our Data Policy for Nubart's Audio guides).

As a Nubart client you receive an overview with usage stats as often as you want. Included in those free data reports:

• Home country of the visitor
• Visitor’s native language
• Visitors per day
• Visitors by time-of-day
• How long do visitors stay at the museum/exhibition
• Ranking of most listened to tracks

Since every card has a unique code, we can do data mining for you. For example, we can answer questions like: "How many French visitors came to my museum during the afternoon?". Or: "let me know if the track Nr. 14 has been more listened to by Japanese then by Chinese visitors".

Our free data reports collect a lot of anonymous information about your visitors and their behavior. But certain important information can not be retrieved automatically, so you need to ask your visitors to provide it to you.

That's why after the last track of the audio-guide, the visitor can interact with your museum through a short survey with 5 questions. Two standard questions are:

• general scoring of the exhibition from 1 - 5.
• a text field for comments about the exhibition or about the audio-guide.

You will be surprised at how thorough these visitor comments can be, even typed on the small smartphone screen! The museum can receive visitor comments in real-time by email.

Additionally the museum can select three more questions from a list of options, allowing you to know things like age, gender or even the email address of your visitors, as long as visitors choose to share this info to you. Thanks to our unique code system, the visitor can only answer the questionnaire once, ensuring the quality of the data. Incomplete answers are also captured.

Are you planning a guided city-tour?

Would you like to have an audio-guide for a natural park?

Our audio-guides can integrate maps and also geolocate points of interest.

Our geolocated audio tracks light up in red and scroll automatically to the top of your mobile screen as you approach the exhibit or location. In Android, this process is enhanced by a slight vibration of the mobile phone.

In this way, your visitor always knows which track she is supposed to listen to next. Whether she wants to click on it or not is up to her: our tracks do not play automatically to enable a non-intrusive functionality.

Our geolocation often also works in offline mode or indoors! We can gladly offer a non-binding test to ensure that this is also possible in your venue.

Our audio-guide in offline mode (ie without internet or data coverage), is ideal for museums that only have free Wi-Fi in the lobby or for audio-tours in areas with poor or no data coverage.

The first access (scanning the code) should take place in an area with connectivity. All digital contents of the audio-guide will be temporarily downloaded to the visitor's smartphone. No need to install an app nor to consume memory! From this point on, the content can be heard in offline mode for as long as necessary. By closing the browser, the content will disappear automatically from the smartphone, but it can be accessed anytime later by using the card again.