For several years, museums have been exploring digital technologies in order to enhance visitor experiences. Initiatives go beyond the traditional multimedia guides to include pervasive uses of mobile technology aiming to create interactive experiences for visitors throughout the museum.

As mobile devices become increasingly integrated into the museum visit, attention is drawn to the issues that affect the effective design of museum experiences through mobile applications.

The term “user experience” refers to how a person feels when interacting with a system. User experience design won’t work in every situation for every user. What works for one person might have the opposite effect on another. So the best one can do is to design for clusters of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns.

This paper particularly focuses on family groups, who are an essential element of the visitor base of many museums. Based on an observational study of family interactions with a tablet application in a science education center in France, the authors identify distinctive patterns of family behavior related to the management of the mobile device among family members as well as the facilitating work that parents need to engage in when supporting their children’s experiences with the mobile devices. Furthermore, they discuss a number of design principles motivating specific approaches to the design of digital experiences for family visiting.

This work supports a broader understanding of how to design mobile applications for use by groups of visitors that both mobile application programmers as well as museum professionals involved in the development of museum mobile applications will find useful.