VMUXE - an approach to user experience evaluation for virtual museums

This paper presents a new approach for the evaluation of User Experience (UX) aspects applied to virtual museums (VM) - VMUXE. A wide percentage of projects and applications for VMs are often "born and buried" in digital labs, without having been experimented and monitored with people. These "prototypes" are the result of experts, technicians, curators, combined together to give birth for multidisciplinary and avant-garde outputs. Earlier attempts to evaluate VM installations failed due to the lack of strategy facing the multidimensional complexity in studying and comparing digital applications in different installations using different devices and metaphors offering different UXs. As a conclusion "communicating" culture through the aid of advanced technology was not a technological issue, but an epistemological one. Setting up a good process of evaluation and analysis is therefore important for establishing next generation virtual museums (NGVM) aiming to reach certain goals such as knowledge exchange, cognitive improvement and heritage communication.