Casual Leisure in Rich-Prospect

Abstract

As digital cultural collections become increasingly sophisticated in their scope and functionality, there is a need to build an in-depth understanding concerning the information behaviors of users in this new domain. Research has demonstrated that many digital museum visitors are engaged in casual leisure during exploration of a collection, suggesting that they do not have an inherent information goal but rather seek new experiences or learning opportunities based on personal curiosity and moments of discovery. Consequently, understanding how to translate casual leisure contexts into meaningful interaction design may play a critical role in designing engaging digital collections. Our study reports on the user experience of a largely unexplored user interface design framework called rich-prospect , which was originally developed to enhance browsing and discovery for complex visual collections. We performed a mixed-method, within-subjects study (N=30) that simulated a casual leisure approach to information browsing and retrieval across three different rich-prospect interfaces for digital cultural heritage. Our results show that rich-prospect scores well in the hedonic facets of its user experience, whereas pragmatic aspects have room for improvement. Additionally, through our qualitative analysis of participant feedback, we derived salient themes relating to the exploratory browsing experience. We conclude with a series of design implications to better connect interactive elements with casual leisure contexts for digital cultural collections.

How generous interface affect user experience and behavior: Evaluating the information display interface for museum cultural heritage

“…This is particularly important for non-professional users or casual leisure users because more non-professional users obtain cultural heritage information through free exploration. 18 Q3: What is the key to improving the generous cultural heritage interface's user experience?…”

“…This model is more appealing to most users who are visiting for no particular reason, namely casual leisure users. 18 In contrast, the traditional interface hides the collections further in the background, and users can only see them by searching in the search bar. To enter the correct relevant keywords, the user must have a clear purpose and a professional background in cultural heritage.…”

“…16 Rich-Prospect browsing means that the interface visualizes the entire cultural heritage data collection upon access and provides additional tools for manipulating and reorganizing it for display. 18 This browsing and retrieval strategy is exceptionally well suited for exploratory browsing and retrieval of cultural heritage resources by casual users with undefined or non-specialized search objectives. 18 Similar to Ruecker's Rich-Prospect interface, Whitelaw proposed a generous interface concept.…”

“…18 This browsing and retrieval strategy is exceptionally well suited for exploratory browsing and retrieval of cultural heritage resources by casual users with undefined or non-specialized search objectives. 18 Similar to Ruecker's Rich-Prospect interface, Whitelaw proposed a generous interface concept. The generous interface is a rich, browsable interface that reveals the scale and complexity of digital heritage collections based on related work and precedents in information retrieval and visualization.…”

“…17 A within-subjects mixed-method study was conducted to simulate a casual leisure approach to information browsing and retrieval across three rich-prospect interfaces for digital cultural heritage. 18 As an example, a new web-based visualization system that enables users to simultaneously explore an extensive collection of images along several different dimensions-spatial, temporal, visual, textual, and through additional metadata fields such as the photographer's name, guided by the concept of generous interfaces was presented. 19 Furthermore, the relationship between generous interfaces and user engagement has been investigated using the comparative analysis method.…”