Engaging Audiences in Virtual Museums by Interactively Prompting Guiding Questions
Zhenjie Zhao

TL;DR
This paper explores the use of interactive guiding questions in virtual museums to enhance user engagement and understanding, inspired by physical museum practices, through experiments and qualitative analysis.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach of using constructed guiding questions and interaction mechanisms to improve engagement in virtual museums, validated by online experiments.
Findings
Interactive questions increase browsing activity
Guiding questions improve content comprehension
Interaction mechanisms influence user engagement
Abstract
Virtual museums aim to promote access to cultural artifacts. However, they often face the challenge of getting audiences to read and understand a large amount of information in an uncontrolled online environment. Inspired by successful practices in physical museums, we investigated the possible use of guiding questions to engage audiences in virtual museums. To this end, we first identified how to construct questions that are likely to attract audiences through domain expert interviews and mining cultural-related posts in a popular question and answer community. Then in terms of the proactive level for attracting users' attention, we designed two mechanisms to interactively prompt questions: active and passive. Through an online experiment with 150 participants, we showed that having interactive guiding questions encourages browsing and improves content comprehension. We discuss reasons…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMultimodal Machine Learning Applications · Expert finding and Q&A systems · Psychological and Educational Research Studies
