Design and development of social media application for expanding experience of museum visitors : a case of temporarily closed museums

Abstract

Museums and art galleries have utilized social media to communicate with their visitors or people who share the same interest and to improve visitors’ experience in six aspects: recreation, socialization, learning experience, aesthetic experience, participatory experience, and enchanting experience. This is very important, especially when the museum was temporarily closed because of damage from natural disasters. The museum has to find an alternative method to present their collections and communicate with their visitors. This paper will describe impact factors of museum visiting experience and introduce the design decision of social media application: virtual gallery, item description, annotations for user opinions, visualization of user opinions, links to users’ Facebook page, and souvenir shop. ActionScripts on Facebook which is a Flash library was used for design and development. Other user interface and online social functions included check-in, comment, like, and status post.