Enhancing Cultural Engagement: A Heuristic Evaluation of World Cultural Heritage Websites

Abstract

Tourists usually visit cultural heritage websites before they travel to the actual sites. The design of the websites thus influences how an individual expect from the historical sites. This study aimed to investigate current cultural heritage websites and to identify the missing features/information that could potentially impact viewers’ cultural engagement. A heuristic evaluation was conducted with eight subject matter experts (each having more than two years of cultural product/web design experiences) on ten world cultural heritage websites (e.g., the official ones for Tower of London, Taj Mahal, and Statue of Liberty, etc.). For the purpose of the evaluation, the goals of cultural web applications (proposed by the Minerva Working Group 5) were provided to the experts. Ratings and design recommendations were collected and analyzed. Results showed numerous misalignments with the goals that made the websites unable to effectively deliver cultural values to viewers. This paper provides insight and contributes to cultural heritage web design.