I siti web e i social dei musei come parte dell’esperienza di visita. La prospettiva della user experience research applicata ai Beni Culturali.

The experience of visiting a cultural place, for a visitor or a group of visitors, is a complex phenomenon. As clearly emerging from previous mixed method research and qualitative studies, from the moment visitors decide to visit and to keep in touch with a museum, a library or another cultural place, they make a journey: they use a combination of media, they go through a series of physical, digital or mixed levels, they meet other people and establish a series of relationships. The visit does not end after leaving museum’s doors, whether it is an on-site or virtual tour, but it continues, thanks to photos and posts shared on social media, to the reading of a catalogue, printed or online, to laboratory activities in class, with a game at home and other possible post-visit activities. A museum visit can be compared to the opening of a matryoshka, in which, in a more or less participatory way, the visitor builds his/her meaning and interpretation of what he/she has been able to experience, comparing the detail with the whole and then the whole itself with detail. The visitor listens to a combination of narratives during their journey, later they can develop his/her own personal narrative of the lived experience, as an internal or shared experience, which is also a form of what he remembers: learning is organized into concepts, mental maps and stories. The website and social media must therefore be seen in this complex perspective, as internal ‘contact points’ of a user journey.