The work aims to comprehensively understand the global characteristics of museum experience design research, grasp the main research focus and theoretical foundations in museum experience design, and explore emerging trends for future development according to the current research hotspots. With museum experience design literature and materials indexed in the Web of Science as the main data, the scientific bibliometrics method combined with VOSviewer and CiteSpace, was employed to draw the scientific knowledge map from the aspects of the year and output distribution of scientific literature, the co-citation of countries, research institutions, authors, references and Keywordclustering, and the visual analysis was made to sort out the research context. The results revealed an overall upward trend in the number of publications within the search scope, with leading research positions held by countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Research hotspots primarily focused on visitor studies, participatory museums, the application of digital interactive technologies in cultural heritage, user experience, and acceptance studies, as well as online museum education. Highly cited publications constituted the primary knowledge foundation for museum experience design, forming a cohesive thread throughout a significant portion of research content. In conclusion, museum experience design research exhibits a strong interdisciplinary nature. Future research is anticipated to emphasize emotional experiences, interactive engagement, and application of intelligent technologies. Emerging industry trends include, but are not limited to, deep digital experiences, personalized user experiences, immersive intelligent environments, and cross-disciplinary collaborations and innovations. The primary limitations at the current research stage include less-than-optimal collaboration among research institutions and a limited number of highly productive authors.