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

The spreading of mobile apps has a great potential for the tourism industry. By 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 study is to identify the key factors as antecedents of customer satisfaction for the design of a mobile app for a museum. To our aim we use the Kano model that allows categorizing service attributes according to how they are perceived by customers and estimating their impact on customer satisfaction. We adopt this model 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 we used qualitative data collected trough 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 our analysis can be relevant for museum and public managers to plan strategic and operative activities, for researcher in the field of touristic marketing, for application developers, and for all those concerned with touristic and cultural heritage issues.