Understanding exhibition experience: a user-centred approach to designing engaging and pleasurable evaluation tools for digitally responsive museum exhibitions

In offering museum active, multi-sensorial experiences, digitally responsive exhibits are an important part of museums' strategy for attracting visitors. Such exhibits are popular, but museums lack understanding of visitors' immediate emotional and physical experience of them. Museums' approach to exhibition evaluation favours the methods of interview and questionnaire, which are not well suited to gathering feedback on the complex mix of audio, kinesthetic and visual experience encountered in digital environments. In addressing a lack of knowledge in the museum studies literature concerning how to investigate visitor experience in such environments, this study draws on the fields of human-computer interaction and user-centred design. The design discipline has a strong interest in people's needs, preferences and experience in respect of designed artifacts, with interaction design being dedicated to the minimization of problems and frustrations in the user-product relationship. Recently, this interest has moved beyond usability to the diverse experiential dimensions of designed artifacts, especially in respect of enjoyment and embodied experience. The thesis argues that user-centred design principles can provide museums with new approaches to exhibition evaluation in respect of digitally-responsive exhibits. Design is doubly implicated here, exhibition and new media design being principal sources of audience experience in such exhibitions. The thesis presents theoretical argument to establish the situation of audience members in digital exhibits. It then argues for the value of interactive, design-driven tools and non-linguistic approaches in gathering audience feedback on such exhibits. To indicate how user-centred evaluation methods might work, the thesis includes a prototype evaluation tool that suggests how rich data on usability factors and visitor experience might be collected. Principles of usercentred design are well established; the thesis makes an original contribution in linking of principles of user-centred design to museum studies to provide a more complete sense of how museums might better understand visitor experience. Equally novel is the embodiment of the knowledge and understanding gained through the research in the form of a designed artifact, a prototype exhibition evaluation tool that allows the findings of the research to be demonstrated to a broad community of interested parties.

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