Casual information visualization on mobile devices considering the museum context

With 79%, smartphones were the most used devices for accessing the internet in the EU in 2016. High-speed mobile data connectivity reaches even remote locations. Increasing computational power and display size provides users a comfortable user experience. However, mobile visualizations which profit from those circumstances are hardly widespread these days. Problems of visualizations on mobile devices are the limited screen size and inexact touch input. Benefits of mobile devices are the high availability and the broad palette of built-in sensors and input options. This might make mobile devices, for example, smartphones, great devices in the museum context. Keeping the needs of casual museum visitors in mind when finding appropriate visualization techniques is a critical task. The present work gives a broad overview of the state of the art of mobile visualizations and the design, implementation, and evaluation of a visualization of an art museum’s collection. Therefore, the collection of the museum of modern art mumok located in Vienna is accessed through the Open Data Portal Österreich. This data is visualized with the libraries D3.js, Google Maps and ngx-charts. For the frontend of the application, the mobile framework Ionic is used. At the end, the application was evaluated in mumok with 21 participants.