Collecting information about museum users to provide personalised and inclusive visits: the Inclusive Memory questionnaire and the web app

Applications for customising the experience within museums are becom- ing increasingly popular. Providing visitors with tools to access personalised educational visits could be one of the key strategies to make museums more accessible and inclusive. For these reasons, within the Inclusive Memory proj- ect a user profiling questionnaire has been developed to be delivered through the use of a multifunctional Web App. Before adopting the methodology developed with subjects at risk of social exclusion, we decided to carry out a preliminary validation involving 15 museum educators in training with the dual purpose of verifying the hypothesis that there are associations between the artistic preferences and personal characteristics of museum visitors and to collect feedback from museum education specialists on the use of a Web App for social inclusion purposes. Data were collected through the integrated use of the questionnaire and focus group discussion. Preliminary results revealed a relation among levels of extroversion, artistic preferences and ways of using the museum. Participants evaluated the visit experience and the multimedia supports provided by the Web App in an apparently incostistent way. The reasons for this disagreement and the importance of collecting users’ data in order to provide an effective experience at the museum are discussed below.