Engaging Audiences in Virtual Museums by Interactively Prompting Guiding Questions

Virtual museums aim to promote access to cultural artifacts. However, they often face the challenge of getting audiences to read and understand a large amount of information in an uncontrolled online environment. Inspired by successful practices in physical museums, we investigated the possible use of guiding questions to engage audiences in virtual museums. To this end, we first identified how to construct questions that are likely to attract audiences through domain expert interviews and mining cultural-related posts in a popular question and answer community. Then in terms of the proactive level for attracting users' attention, we designed two mechanisms to interactively prompt questions: active and passive. Through an online experiment with 150 participants, we showed that having interactive guiding questions encourages browsing and improves content comprehension. We discuss reasons why they are useful by conducting another qualitative comparison and obtained insights about the influence of question category and interaction mechanism.