Expanding the Experience of Museum Visitors with a Social Application on Facebook

Since the early 20th century, museums and art galleries have been responding to a changing, increasingly diverse society, wherein a broader public is interested in culture and/ or arts. They are adjusting their products or adopting the existing technology to the needs of this changing society in order to serve a larger part of the population and gain revenues. With a burst of very popular social media, several museums have utilized the social media such as Facebook, Blog, Podcast, MySpace, and Flickr to communicate with their visitors or interesting group of people. Many visitors will learn new things and gain new experience for a single visit at museum. However, there are a number of silent barriers against the visitor experience, especially for art galleries. This paper proposes a methodology for expanding the visitor experience. Our methodology utilizes the existing social media such as Facebook. We introduce a new application with design decision. The preliminary results are its framework and the evaluation method. We also present a case study on the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum (SEACM) at Bangkok University, Thailand. By the interview with experts, our application is a new channel to be able to enhance and expand the museum experience. Keywordssocial media; user networks; user experience; digital museums; virtual gallery; art museums.