ABSTRACT

Public participation and visitor satisfaction in museums are directly related to the experience of learning, discovery and involvement in motivating learning behaviours. In most cases, visitors’ experiences are significantly improved if they gain substantial knowledge on each artefact of interest from the museum guides and this is critical to user satisfaction, however, the ratio of human guides to visitors is grossly inadequate. A visitor touring in a group is hardly taken care of individually by the human guide. In addition, existing information systems for museums guides are often limited to museum-based gadgets or platform-specific smart devices provided by the museums, but not always familiar to the visitor. This study explored alternative ways that avail museum content to a broader user base while offering an increasing and personalised interactive content through multiple visitors' own smart devices. A constructive research methodology that uses quantitative and qualitative data plus incremental software prototyping development and testing were used in this study, with the main objective of producing a location-aware interactive virtual guide that is easy to use, stable and able to run on a broad range of mobile device operating systems. The outcome systems were developed with AngularJS Framework (Web application) and Ionic Framework (cross-platform mobile application), these two combined constitutes an overall museum’s mobile guide system-iMuseum. The system aims to offer the museum a platform that will enable more visitors to have individual experience and interact with historical artefacts, plus additionally offer relevant information when and wherever a visitor needs it without having an employee going around with everyone. This study was contextualized to Namibian museums using the Independence Memorial Museum (IMM) as a testing site. The contributions of this study can then be used to implement related systems in other learning and cultural heritage institutions like galleries, libraries, achieves and museums(GLAM).