User Testing a Hypermedia Tour Guide

I nformation technology’s rapid evolution offers a great opportunity to enhance people’s education and understanding of their cultural heritage. IT can do this in many ways, from facilitating digital acquisition of data from pictures and relics to multimedia content presentations. Currently, people access cultural and arts information through interactions with desktop computers and other similar platforms, including standalone programs, CD-ROMs, Web sites, and information kiosks. However, even in this arena, ubiquitous computing systems1 can make an important contribution by supporting people in the most important moment of their educational experience: when they are up close to the subject, whether they’re viewing a painting in a museum, a monument in a park, or an animal in the zoo. Several research projects in ubiquitous and context-aware computing have focused on computer support for museum and tour guides.2,3 Nevertheless, little has been published about how end users evaluate and accept ubicomp systems in museum and park environments.4 Here, we address that user perspective, presenting results from experiments aimed at understanding how pervasive computing can support a museum-like experience. Our emphasis is on how ubicomp systems affect real visitors in real environments. In our project, we tested user acceptance and evaluation of hypermedia guides run on palmtop computers at Genoa’s Costa Aquarium, the largest European aquarium and one of Italy’s most visited cultural sites, with more than a million visitors per year. Figure 1 shows the guide, including the software we developed, which has been available for rent to the public since December 2000. Before describing our experiments and results, we disAlthough handheld guides have been proposed as a way to enhance visitors’ experience of museums and exhibitions, the authors describe user studies that actually test the theory in a real-world setting. I N T E G R A T E D E N V I R O N M E N T S