Best Practices für die Gestaltung virtueller Museumsräume

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates the relevance of virtual museums, which provide access to art and cultural heritage even in times when museums are closed. Besides their undisputable relevance, another important factor is the acceptance of virtual museums, which primarily depends on usability and user experience. So far, there are only generic guidelines for the design of user-friendly virtual environments, such as the twelve heuristics presented by Sutcliffe and Gault 2004. This paper presents an evaluation of those VE heuristics and their applicability to virtual museums. To do so, we select six exemplary virtual exhibitions and evaluate them with respect to the existing heuristics. Based on the results, we present best practices for the design of virtual museums. Furthermore, we discuss limitations of the existing heuristics. Two existing heuristics do not seem to be suitable for virtual museums. In addition, we complement two heuristics which could be derived from the examples and argue for a further development of domain-specific heuristics and best practices for virtual museums in order to systematically improve knowledge transfer in the sense of the public history approach..

Keywords

• heuristik
• informationswissenschaft
• usability
• virtual environment
• virtuelles museum