The application of a phenomenological framework to assess user experience with museum technologies

Providing visitors with a valuable experience of the past has become a crucial mission for cultural heritage institutions. The experience of the past is one where visitors understand the museum’s communications about the meaning of artefacts and where visitors undertake an active role in interpretation and reflection on the past. Several studies promote technologies as a good way for museums to reenergize their relationships with their visitors. But even as some research has concentrated more and more on visitor experiences, this work has neither particularly stressed on visitors’ experience of the past nor on their evaluation of museum technologies with respect to their potential for engendering a better experience of the past. Monod and Klein (2005) elaborated a phenomenological framework with six criteria to evaluate IT used in the cultural heritage. Since it has not been empirically “validated” yet, the objective of this paper is to employ these criteria with samples of users of museum technologies and in the process determine whether these criteria can be met by IT. Our field study indicates that technologies available in museums positively contribute to an experience of the past.