Abstract User Interaction Styles in Museum

This paper will analyse a variety of interaction styles that can be designed in hypermedia applications, will point out the need of using them consistently, and will analyze the possible design trade-offs between richness of interaction and easiness of use. Examples will be taken from a museum hypermedia we are currently developing in co-operation with the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milano. Multimedia and hypermedia can have a potentially enormous exploitation in museums, addressing different categories of users and serving for a variety of purposes. Just to mention few examples, we may think of hypermedia interfaces to museum databases- to support the activity of museum operators, or hypermedia information points, catalogues, or exhibitions- locally installed for museum visitors, distributed on CD-ROM's [19, 221 or on the Internet for education or research use. Whatever the intended use of a museum hypermedia, its ultimate goal is comprehension and usability. In other words, it must allow users to understandthe application content, the application goals and "message", and to use the system in a easy and natural way. Comprehension and usability both depend on a number of factors: the quality of contents (the clearness of written texts, the incisiveness of multimedia elements), the elegance of the lay-out, and, last but not least, the quality of user interaction. The term "interaction " refers to how users operate on the various information structures and functionalities of a hypermedia application by acting on lay-out elements. In this paper, we will focu