Ask a museum visitor why they turned left instead of right at the entrance hall, and most will say they simply followed the room. Few will notice that the room was built to be followed. Gallery sequencing is one of the oldest forms of directed user experience in existence — older than the phrase "user experience" by at least a century.
Enfilade and the single path
Classic museum buildings often use enfilade planning: a straight sequence of doorways aligned so you can see through an entire wing from one end. It removes ambiguity about where to go next at the cost of removing choice altogether. Contemporary galleries increasingly reject enfilade for a hub-and-spoke plan — a central room from which several wings branch, letting visitors choose an order, provided the museum is willing to write labels that make sense regardless of the sequence a visitor arrives in.
Designing for the second visitor
The hardest part of a floor plan isn't guiding the visitor who reads every label. It's the visitor who wanders for eleven minutes, glances at three works, and leaves believing they've seen "the museum." Curators design for that visitor as much as for the attentive one, using sightlines, lighting, and a handful of unmissable pieces positioned exactly where a tired person's eyes naturally land.
A floor plan is an argument about what matters, made in advance, on behalf of someone who hasn't arrived yet.
Digital products make the identical bet every time they decide what appears above the fold.