🎟️Audience Onboarding

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding

Although digital devices and internet use are prevalent in many countries, audience members do not intuitively understand how to navigate through choose-your-own-adventure shows, create avatars for VR theatre, or even join Zoom meetings. It is up to digital theatre makers to build in a certain amount of instruction for audiences to help them navigate the creative experience. , but his recommendation resonates as dramaturgy for audience onboarding as well:

Your overriding narrative arc is not within a virtual world, but in the real world; it’s the one in which a person starts to engage with your design, engages, and then ceases. This might be when he or she puts on a headset, does whatever is to be done, and then takes off the headset. Think about that overall experience. What is the person expecting before going in? What’s it like to come out?

In-person shows have a well-trodden path. The basic steps of attending a digital theatre performance may seem very similar, but your audience will likely need help troubleshooting technical issues, learning what appropriate audience interactions look like, and even which buttons to press to enter the platform. Digital theatre requires audience onboarding not only because of potential software or hardware problems, but because there are numerous methods of making and spectating digital theatre – thus, a unique approach to the show requires additional support and education.

Audience onboarding is important not only from the technical side, but for accessibility and community-building reasons: that ‘by drawing people together and engaging them in a transformative experience, theatre works to promote more ethical forms of coexistence within public space, while at the same time producing unethical exclusions from public space’. Digital theatre has the opportunity to not just claim to be more accessible, but actually consider how to be more accessible – and this may include more in-depth, personalised help. This discussion of audience onboarding provides insight onto how digital theatre makers solved these problems, so you can consider how you can build this process into your work.