M-dimensions: a framework for evaluating and comparing interactive installations in museums

Designing and evaluating digital interactive experiences for museums requires scrupulous attention to every aspect that contributes to an engaging and rich learning experience. The evaluation of interactive installations in museums is a very demanding endeavor due to the intersection of multiple research fields, such as human computer interaction, design and multimedia, museum studies, audience research, etc. In this paper we introduce a novel framework with ten dimensions for guiding the design and evaluation of interactive installations, specifically tailored to museums. The conception of the framework was based on current usability evaluation methods and principles as well as museology literature. It was then iteratively refined and finally validated with and a long-term study about interactivity in all the interactive museums of a specific geographic region. The results obtained emphasize the importance of adopting the proposed framework for future research on interactive museums evaluation.