It is widely agreed that museums and other cultural heritage venues should provide visitors with personalised interaction and services such as personalised mobile guides, although currently most do not. Since museum visitors are typically first-time visitors and since their visit is for a relatively short session, personalisation should use initial interaction data to associate the user with a particular persona and thereby infer other facts about the user's preferences and needs. In this paper we report a questionnaire-based study carried out with 105 visitors of a Science and Technology Centre to examine the minimal features needed to identify visitor personas. We find that museum visitors can be clustered by their visit motivation and perceived success factors; these clusters are found to correspond both with Falk's visitor categorisation and a prior classification of exploration styles. Consequently, these two features can be used to reliably identify the visitor persona, and therefore, can be used for user modeling.

Personalising museum mobile guides is widely acknowledged as being important for enhancing the visitor experience. Due to the lack of information about an individual visitor and the relatively limited time of his or her visit, adapting the user interface based on a museum visitor's type is a promising approach to personalisation. This approach first requires a mechanism to identify the visitor type (‘persona’) and, second, knowledge of the preferences and needs of different types to apply personalisation. In this article, we report a face-to-face questionnaire study carried out with 105 visitors to Scitech, a science and technology visitor centre. The study aims to investigate the main facts required to identify a visitor persona and to explore the preferences of different visitor personas for particular mobile guide features. We limited our concern to the user interface features of the guide (e.g., whether it provides recommendations for related items to view) rather than what content and services the guide provides (e.g., what related items are recommended). We found that we can reliably identify the visitor persona using two multiple choice questions about visit motivation and perceived success criteria. In addition, we found that visitors have significant preferences for particular features such as presentation media, venue navigation tool, object suggestions, details level, accessing external links, exhibit information retrieval method and social interaction features such as voice communication, instant messaging, group games and challenges. Some features were found to be preferred differently by different personas such as the challenges feature, some were found to be preferred by personas differently to the overall preference such as in presentation media, and some were found to be preferred by some personas with no particular preference for others such as a venue navigation tool. Instant messaging was found to be significantly not preferred by all personas. The results provide a basis for personalisation of museum guides and services using a personas approach, which is a solution where data about individual users may be limited and where the individual configuration of a user interface may not be practical or warranted.