Before VGC: user experience research as a key methodology for the development of digital interactive services within museal contexts

By H.C. Huynh (1), B. Mellini (2), A. Talamo (2), C. Muccitelli (3), E. Nemilova (4), and C. Tortolini (5)

(1) Freelance Information Architect; (2) Sapienza University, Rome; (3) Freelance UX Designer; (4) Freelance Psychologist; (5) C28 S.r.l.

The talk aims at explore how visitors’ experience of fruition is shaped into one of the most important public museums in Rome. It summarizes the research phase of a design project developed by the authors within the context of a master degree, showing how research data come into insights for service design.

The main objective of the research is to analyze users needs before and during the design phase in order to collect visitors’ experience and enhancing it with specific design choices. In fact, if we analyse visitors experience within the user-centred design perspective, several considerations came out on how to foster visitors participation in the development of solutions for a better fruition of cultural heritage.

The first one is that qualitative data that arise from ethnographic research based on fieldstudy, shadowing and interviews  constitute the first visitor generated content. In fact, a qualitative methodology implies the adoption of the visitor point of view from the start of a design process, thus assuring full understanding of what a visitor is able/may want to generate or share.

The second one deals again with the involvement of users in content generation and on how this expression is multifaceted since it sums up together the process and the product of visitors participation at different stages of the research/design phase.