Design of Handheld Interactive Support

The growing availability of small devices whose computational and interactive resources are continuously increasing in terms of power and capacity has raised an interesting discussion on how to exploit them to support users in various contexts of use. We propose a solution that can be easily adopted for users such as museum visitors. The basic elements are the use of a multimedia PDA (without the use of location-aware technology) whose main purpose is to support a user who can move freely about within a museum. The structure of the user interface allows users to easily orient themselves through appropriate visual representations and then sees to providing the information that can be interesting for them by exploiting the multimedia capabilities of the device. In this paper we describe and discuss our initial design in a concrete case study, the related user feedback received from many visitors, and the design improvements obtained by considering users' experiences.