Usability, Design and Content Issues of Mobile Apps for Cultural Heritage Promotion: The Malta Culture Guide Experience

TL;DR

This paper explores the design, usability, and content challenges faced in creating a mobile app for promoting Malta's rich cultural heritage, offering insights into development strategies and evaluation methods.

Contribution

It provides a detailed case study of developing a cultural heritage mobile app, highlighting planning, usability, and content issues specific to cultural promotion.

Findings

Identified key usability issues in cultural heritage apps

Proposed strategies for engaging long-term users

Outlined evaluation methods for app effectiveness

Abstract

The paper discusses the experience of producing and distributing an iPhone app for promotion of the Maltese Cultural Heritage on behalf of the Malta Tourism Authority. Thanks to its position at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta has been a crossroads of civilisations whose traces are still visible today, leaving a particularly rich and varied cultural heritage, from megalithic temples to baroque palaces and Caravaggio masterpieces. Conveying all these different aspects within a single application, using textual, visual, and audio means, has raised many different issues about the planning and production of cultural content for mobile usage, together with usability aspects regarding design and distribution of a mobile app. In this paper, we outline all of these aspects, focusing on the design and planning strategies for a long-term user commitment and how to evaluate results for cultural mobile applications. We include experience of all the steps of developing a mobile app, information that is of possible benefit to other app developers in the cultural sector.