Enhancing a Museum Mobile Application through User Experience Design: A Comparative Analysis

Museum mobile applications usually aim at enhancing the visitors’ experience, but a poor application design may dissuade people to extensively use the digital tools throughout the visit. In order to make multimedia guides appealing and easy to use, the interaction model, the information architecture and the graphic interfaces need thus to be carefully crafted. This paper presents a comparative analysis of a museum mobile application developed for the exploration of Palazzo Madama-Museo Civico d’Arte Antica (Torino, Italy). The results of an experimental evaluation on the ground from nearly 200 users led to a better understanding of museum visitors’ needs and supported a thorough comparison between two different releases of the mobile application, highlighting limits, enhancement of the visitors’ experience and improvements in their exploration behaviors. Finally, future research directions are proposed by building on the reported real-world experimental evaluation