Including domain experts in the design of applications for visits to cultural heritage sites: it matters!

Cultural heritage provides a great legacy that more and more people will hopefully learn to experience and appreciate in the future. Information and communication technologies may contribute to increase public awareness of cultural heritage. The contribution of domain experts and even end users to the design of successful applications that may best fit users’ needs and expectations is very important. This position paper presents an End-User Development approach for the development of interactive applications to support visits to cultural heritage sites. It enables the various stakeholders to cooperate in shaping the final applications according to evolving needs of the end users. The approach builds on a theoretical model which defines the stakeholders participating in the design-development-evolution of such applications, the resources involved and the relations among them. A design framework based on the model is currently being developed