Designing web user interfaces for museum applications to support different types of users

The user access to a web interface of a museum application can have many motivations. There are various types of users, who want to perform various task;, in various contexts, that can access to the same web site. Thus it is important to have user interfaces able to adapt to these different user requirements to facilitate the accomplishment of the desired goals. Most of current: web interfaces to museum information do not take into account this variety of type of users thus providing interfaces that some users find not usable to achieve their goals. In this paper we discuss the various possible levels of support that can be given to different users during the web navigation of museum information. In particular we focus our attention on how to obtain adaptable and adaptive interfaces using the web site for the Marble Museum, that we have developed, as a source of examples for our discussion of the possible solutions.