Individualized Visits to Foster the Engagement and the re-visit in Museums

Stéphanie Rey (1, 2, 3, 4) , Anke Brock (5) , Célia Picard (5) , Christophe Bortolaso (3) , Mustapha Derras (3) , Nadine Couture (4, 1, 2)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 UB - Université de Bordeaux
3 Berger-Levrault
4 ESTIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
5 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

Museums have become places that, besides conserving and storing artefacts, provide visitors with education and amusement. They now have to compete with the entertainment industry to attract visitors and expand their audience. The use of digital technology is emerging as a solution. While many studies focus on the visitor side, we are interested in tools for museum staff. To understand their needs and processes, we adopted a participatory and iterative design process, involving museum professionals as end-users at each step (i.e. user observation, design, prototyping, users tests). We conducted 7 meetings, 4 interviews studies and 2 experimental observations with 12 museum experts (communication, IT, public and content experts) from 5 institutions (Exhibition Centres, Science Centre, Archaeological Museum, Museum of Fine Arts). Our analysis revealed two issues faced by these museums. First, despite the recommendation of institutional documents, visitors service is almost never involved before the end of the exhibition design process. Thus, they have no mean to shape the scenography in order to adapt it to visitors. Second, we identified a strong need for encouraging local visitors’ engagement and revisit. Diversifying the visits is a solution considered by museums, but relying on temporary exhibits is too costly for small museums and creating thematic visits is not participatory enough. The creation of individualized visits, allowing visitors to explore existing exhibition on their own depending on their needs and desires, meets both challenges. We thus focus on the design of tools that empower museum professionals to create such visits. We identified that museums need, first, to collect more information about their visitors and, second, to be able to create, evolve and maintain the solutions on their own according to visitors needs. Our aim is to design a tool which respects these two key points and could enable the creation of personalized and dynamic museum visits.

Mots clés: Human Computer Interaction; Digital Museum Experience; Interview Study; Personalization

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Stéphanie Rey, Anke Brock, Célia Picard, Christophe Bortolaso, Mustapha Derras, et al.. Individualized Visits to Foster the Engagement and the re-visit in Museums. ESOF 2018, EuroScience Open Forum, Jul 2018, Toulouse, France. 2018. ⟨hal-01767939⟩