The Culture on the Palm of Your Hand: How to Design a User Oriented Mobile App for Museums

The increased usage of mobile apps has a great potential for the tourism industry. Through the use of mobile apps, web portals and social media may allow a fast and wide diffusion of awareness for museum and attract a large number of visitors, thus increasing the value of their image, with moderate investments. The aim of this chapter is to identify the key factors as antecedents of customer satisfaction for the design of a mobile app for a museum. To this aim, the authors use the Kano model that allows categorizing service attributes according to how they are perceived by customers and estimating their impact on customer satisfaction. This model is adopted in order to identify express and latent needs of cultural tourists and to design a mobile app for museum according to their perceptions and expectations. To apply the Kano model, the authors used qualitative data collected through 300 questionnaires administered to tourists visiting the Sicilian cities of Palermo and Trapani over a period of 3 months (October- December 2012). The results of this analysis can be relevant for museum and public managers to plan strategic and operative activities, for researchers in the field of touristic marketing, for applicationì developers, and for all those concerned with touristic and cultural heritage issues.