Enhancing the digital heritage experience from field to museum: User-centered system design of an augmented reality tablet application for cultural heritage

Abstract

As smartphones and tablets continue to pervade our daily lives, museums have turned to these devices as a new platform for engaging visitors with cultural heritage. However, the needs of the museum visitor are often overlooked when designing these applications. Researchers from CISA3 are beginning to address this problem by performing studies to gage users' wants in both engaging with the interfaces of mobile applications and the affordances associated with their environment of use. CISA3 has developed its own augmented reality tablet application, ARtifact, which intends to put a wealth of collected information directly into the hands of both researchers and the general public in a variety of contexts [1]. With ARtifact, users can examine metadata in museums as well as in the field at archaeological sites [2]; users are able to view both multispectral images of artifacts and annotated information pertaining to them in real time using the tablet's video seethrough interface. Wishing to deliver an optimal experience that engages the user and enhances the discovery and learning process, we followed the methodology of cognitive design to refine ARtifact's utility, based on contextual interviews for data collection and affinity diagrams for qualitative data organization and interpretation. Interviews were conducted in three stages. The first round of interviews took place at the Timken Museum in Balboa Park, San Diego, shadowing the art museum's testing of a new in-house developed mobile app. For this initial round, twenty-three visitors were interviewed and observed as they made their way around the museum. The second round of interviews took place with two directors from Balboa Park looking into enhancing the use of technology throughout the park, providing access to findings on extensive prior visitor research that the