Aplicativo para sondagem de públicos em museus

Abstract

Museums need to know about their visitors in order to establish with them an efficient and effective communication. So, research on visitors is an important activity to guide what kind of services these institutions should offer. Although informational and communicational technologies are being used in museums, they still make little contribution to the research on visitors. This paper presents a project that focuses on a mobile application to collect data from the visitor of the Câmara Cascudo Museum at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. An interaction design methodology was applied to maintain focus on the user’s experience while conceiving a digital solution. The desk and interview research methods were used to learn about the history, context, and needs around the museum; topics that should be considered when defining the project requirements. We then focused on the conception of the interaction to define the questionnaire queries, as well in which and in what order the user and the system interact during the use. The interaction solution was registered in a low fidelity prototype to undergo a formative evaluation by using the evaluation methods in paper prototypes and focal groups. The interaction solution was revised to guide the interface design conception, which defined the way the interaction would be represented (configured) at the boundary between user and system. The interface design considered efficiency, ease of learning, control and freedom of the user, legibility, readability and visual consistency. By means of a high-fidelity interactive prototype, a usability test was carried on to enable a summative evaluation. The achieved digital solution has potential to be useful for the museum, with low cost, high flexibility, easy both updating and data analysis. This tool shall improve the management of the museum in the short, medium and long term.