EVALUATING THE USERS’ EXPERIENCE OF A PDA-BASED SOFTWARE APPLIED IN ART MUSEUMS R. Tesoriero, M. Lozano, J. A. Gallud and V. M. R. Penichet Laboratory of User Interaction and Software Engineering Department of Computer Systems. University of Castilla-La Mancha. Albacete, Spain [ricardo, mlozano, jgallud, vpenichet]@dsi.uclm.es Keywords: Mobile technology, Art Museums, Usability testing, PDA. Abstract: Mobile devices as smartphones or PDAs are common in our daily life. Museums and art galleries provide electronic guides in order to do more pleasant a visit or exhibition. The problem tackled in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using a PDA, instead of the traditional guides. In this case an application was specially developed to provide users that are visiting the museum additional information and help. It is interesting to know how to adapt these devices to guide and improve visitors’ experience. Moreover, we have to take into account that technology should not be the centre of attention in art museums or exhibitions, but it should be unperceivable. Thus, in this paper, we describe an evaluation of a real system deployed in an emblematic museum in Spain, called Cutlery Museum of Albacete. Our approach offers visitors a PDA that employs a wireless network to show additional information about old knives, jack-knives and scissors which are exhibited in the museum. In this way, art and technology are combined with success. The system supports four languages and incorporates special functions for disabled people. This article shows the users’ satisfaction results collected during the last 18 months. These results lead to a detailed analysis suggesting some improvements for future versions of the software. 1 INTRODUCTION The application of mobile technologies to Museums and exhibition environments in general has been an area of special research interest in the last years. Particularly, the use of wireless networks has improved considerably this new way of accessing information in a ubiquitous way within these environments. Undoubtedly, these emerging technologies can be used to enhance interactivity among museum visitors. Concretely, in the city of Albacete, Spain, there is a museum dedicated to exhibit valuable and very antique cutlery pieces. This is the scenario in which we have implemented these new technologies to improve visitors’ experience when visiting this concrete museum. Interaction improvements in museum exhibits using augmented artefacts are proposed in (Ciolfi and Bannon, 2002). These improvements are usually performed by experts in the area (students volunteers, docents, etc.) We think that these improvements may be provided in some degree by an electronic device. The system developed (Gallud et al., 2005) and currently running in the Cutlery Museum of Albacete has been designed to provide guidance to visitors, and to show additional information about the exhibited pieces, as well as other stored pieces that are not physically available for the public. The system has been running for 18 months, and during this period several tests to measure the users’ satisfaction and opinion about the new system have been performed. In this paper we show the results of experiments carried out with real users and extract some conclusions from these results to improve the system. As antecedent of HCI electronic guides test we may mention (Steele, 2002). The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Firstly, we present the state of the art in the field of new technologies applied to improve users’ experience in art museums and exhibitions. Then, we describe the software architecture of the system and the evolution stages from the initial to the current specifications. As mentioned before, we are working with a real system running in the Cutlery Museum of Albacete and, at the same time, we are defining a new system 351