Research on a User-Centered Evaluation Model for Audience Experience and Display Narrative of Digital Museums

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents Research on An Analysis and Evaluation Model for Audience Experience and Display Narrative of Digital Museum (according to its title). The paper compares 3 models of abstracting a digital museum determined by analysing functional components of museum websites around the world. The models are fed into a questionnaire (Digital Museum Website User Assessment Scale) and results are discussed.

Main issue:

The paper does not seem to fit the aim and scope of the MDPI electronics journal. It has very little to do with Computer Science & Engineering or other subject areas and more with sociological studies. In fact many references in the bibliography are to non-technical journals.

Other issues:

• The "digital" part of the work has to be more properly emphasized for the paper to be accepted to this journal. Please provide a more detailed description of how you devised the models A, B and C with a focus on the technical parameters. (how you made web component classification, how you developed the experimental platform etc.)
• Fig. 3 and 4 are unclear, please enhance the quality
• Please explain better the results in Fig. 5. What is the impact of the values obtained ?
• The conclusion section is overly long and composed of 4 subsections. This is not usual practice. Please provide a separate Conclusion section. Plase do not use references in the Conclusion section

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper needs some proof reading to help increase its flow and readability to the users. The concept this paper presents is not really novel. Much has been written and presented on the digitisation of museums and culture in general. I would have liked to see a review of best practices and case examples and the results of such practices. To assume digital museum experiences are only linked to websites in terms of content and quality is I believe quite limiting as the museum experience should as has been published by a number of research, provide a more wholistic experience. That said, I also believe that this paper would have benefited from a clearer research direction and by defining the main research questions driving this research forward. The authors mention hypotheses in the methodology but I believe that a stronger description of the main aim of the study, and the research framework proposed would make the introduction of this study a bit more robust. 

The methods seem appropriate though the sampling is rather on the low side to achieve proper empirical results. In fact since the population was rather biased (all were University students), when in fact a museum audience is quite diverse, and when the numbers of samples were so low, one can hardly generalise on such data. Maybe this can pointed out as a limitation of the study and inserted in this paper. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf