Unleashing Personalized Museum Experiences: Insights from Comparative Structured Observation of Museo* design alternatives

Museums aim at personalizing visits to offer tailored content and encourage visitors to come back. Unfortunately, museum professionals find it difficult to reflect on the vast number of visitor profiles when creating personalized visits. We propose Museo* a new concept to support their creation strategy by allowing the selection of visitor characteristics. Through an interactive design process, we instantiated this concept with MuseoTUI, that displays the progress of visit creation by illuminating physical tokens, and MuseoGUI that displays on a standard touchscreen. In an in-situ comparative structured observation, we evaluated both prototypes. The concept Museo* is well understood and accepted with both interaction styles. MuseoGUI was perceived as more efficient, while MuseoTUI provided better stimulation, higher user experience and the physical manipulation was described as a valuable support for empathy, reflection, and creation. Based on these findings, we present design implications for future systems supporting the creation of personalized visits.