Interactions around a Multi-touch Tabletop: A Rapid Ethnographic Study in a Museum

Interactive multi-touch tabletops are increasingly making their way into public spaces such as museums, galleries or visitor centres, aiming to support interactions between friends or families. An ‘in-the-wild’ rapid ethnography was carried out in a museum to explore the interactions between users of different age groups who gather around a multi-touch table and investigate whether the spatial factor affects their behavior. Observations and interviews focused on the factors that attract visitors’ attention, the impressions after the first touch and the group interactions. Honey-pot effect, latency times and the tabletop’s physical appearance were the main factors that influenced visitors’ behavior. Another interesting finding highlighted the importance of sound in attracting visitors’ attention. This study identifies implications in developing engaging and usable applications used in real-world settings and provides suggestions on how interactive installations may integrate into a particularly constrained physical context to support and enrich the overall user experience.