An interactive coal mine museum visit: Prototyping the user experience

Interactive software applications are increasingly finding their way to cultural and tourist sites. During the development of a coal mine museum on the former mine site of Beringen (Province of Limburg, Belgium), we explored the possibilities of such interactive systems, suitable for the specific site and the intended target group. In particular, we concentrated on a mobile location-based educational game allowing young visitors to gain insight in the life of the miner, and on an interactive virtual environment (VE) giving the visitor an overview of the vast site, highlighting interesting locations. In this paper we share our experiences with several prototyping techniques in the context of user-centred design (UCD). The different prototyping techniques are chosen depending on the goal and the kind of prototype. Furthermore we describe the interplay between the created prototypes and the applied prototyping techniques.