A taxonomy for the evaluation of mobile museum guides

Museums are a fertile ground for experimentations with edutainment applications conceived for mobile devices. However the design, implementation and maintenance of mobile multimedia guides is a time and resources consuming iterative process to which ideally all involved stakeholders should participate. Evaluation therefore is of outmost importance. Drawing from already published results and on site experience from DANAE project we define three categories of evaluation key points, under which all possible evaluation questions measuring the effectiveness of an edutainment application can be classified; we then match them with all involved stakeholders, mainly museums, their visitors and information technologies companies. Finally, we argue that the proposed taxonomy can be used for the classification of different evaluation questions so as to constitute a comprehensive and adjustable guide for evaluation purposes of applications for different and heterogeneous museum environments.