What 34,000 visitors taught us about experience design
- May 21
- 3 min read
Updated: May 23
Back in 2024, I led the design and experience in my previous role as a partner at Plat Institute, to create the Future Food Museum at Abu Dhabi Global Food Week. A physical walk-through installation exploring innovation in culinary techniques, sustainable materials, and the future of food. Over four days, 34,000 people walked through it, making it the most visited experience at the summit (and the highest NPS score).
Here's what we learned.
People don't read, they just flow and interact.
We spent weeks refining the narrative arc of the museum. The themes, the sequencing, the way each room built on the one before. What we discovered on day one is that most visitors don't follow your intended path. They drift toward what catches their eye. They skip panels. They cluster around things they can touch or smell. The lesson isn't that narrative doesn't matter. It does. But it has to work even when people experience it out of order. Every station needs to stand on its own while still contributing to the whole.
The first ten seconds decide everything.
We observed that visitors made a decision within moments of entering: am I going to engage with this, or am I going to walk through quickly and leave? The entrance had to do real work. Not explain the concept. Not introduce the sponsors. It had to create a feeling. Curiosity, surprise, slight disorientation. Something that made people slow down. The installations that performed best were the ones that provoked a reaction before any text was read.
Simplicity scales, complexity doesn't.
We had sections with rich, layered storytelling and sections with a single powerful visual and one sentence. The simpler ones consistently drew more attention, more photos, more time spent. When you're designing for 34,000 people over four days, you're not designing for the most attentive visitor. You're designing for someone who is tired, overstimulated, and deciding between your installation and the coffee and pizza stand next door with a loud Italian host and free Pizza! The simpler you make the core message, the more people it reaches. We also offered one of the best Oysters from France thanks to our partners Sorlut so the competition was interesting...
Logistics are the invisible design layer.
No one talks about this, but the flow of people through a physical space is itself a design problem. Bottlenecks ruin experiences. If one station creates a queue, the one behind it gets skipped. We had to rethink spacing, station width, and dwell time estimates after the first morning. Experience design doesn't end at the creative concept. It includes crowd flow, signage placement, lighting transitions, and the distance between stations. The operational layer is where the experience survives or dies.
Context changes what people value.
Abu Dhabi in late November, during a global food industry event, with attendees from dozens of countries. What resonated wasn't the most technically advanced content. It was the content that connected innovation to something people already cared about: the food they eat, the waste they produce, the future their children will inherit. The more human the angle, the stronger the response. Technology and sustainability landed best when framed as personal, not industrial.
We came back from Abu Dhabi with a notebook full of observations and a much sharper sense of what works when you're designing experiences at scale.
The biggest takeaway is simple: the best ideas in the world don't matter if the experience doesn't respect how people actually behave. Design for the real visitor, not the ideal one.
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