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Abstract Interactive museum exhibits are ubiquitous in science centers, and are becoming increasingly popular in art, history and cultural museums. At an interactive exhibit, visitors can act on the exhibit and the exhibit reacts. While there is much theoretical and empirical support for the idea that interactive features promote science learning, we believe that serious design problems can arise if an uncritical “more is better” approach is taken to interactivity. This article describes five common pitfalls of designing exhibits with high levels of interactivity or multiple interactive features: 1) multiple options with equal salience, 2) features allowing multiple users to interfere with one another, 3) options that encourage users to disrupt the phenomenon being displayed, 4) features that make the critical phenomenon difficult to find, and 5) secondary features that obscure the primary feature. Examples of each of the five problems are presented, and possible design solutions are offered.
Allen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.