A Mobile Guide App Platform Prototype with Front-end Evaluation and Potential Business Model for Museums in Finland

Shuchen Wang, Finland

Published paper: A Mobile Guide App Platform Prototype with Front-end Evaluation and Potential Business Model for Museums in Finland

Museums in Finland operate as a network with a centralized management for collections and administration due to the moderate size of their buildings, collections, exhibitions, and numbers of visitors. This network provides a good base to develop a mobile tool for the purpose of audience outreach and exhibition mediation, which are presently weak in the mobile and web environment. This paper concludes the first part of an ongoing research project in the analysis of the conditions for developing such a tool, describing the conditions and verifying the hypothesis that a distributed mobile guide app platform as a tool would attract more visitors to museums and better facilitate museum communication. The first task has been to deal with the existing literature and public archives. The second task has been to describe the prototypes in information architecture, in-app features as GPS, interactive maps, links to social media, etc. The third task has been carried out as a front-end evaluation and with suggested business models, knowing that a thorough app user experience study combined with a museum visitor behavior study as a second part of the research project will later be able to provide more complete insight.