Musei digitali e Generazione Z. Stato dell’arte e metodologia d’indagine

The perception of online museum offering and its direct evaluation by the target of young Z Generation was conditioned by the cultural process activated as a digital reaction to the lockdown, which led to a sudden acceleration in the digitalization processes and online presence, with an increasingly user-oriented approach, both in our country and elsewhere. According to this research resulting reflections, this approach seems in some cases to be a partially kept promise (and only by some museums) and, to a greater scale, disregarded. If research on digital cultural offer appears numerous and increasingly transdisciplinary, the studies about the perception and impact that this offer has had on the most disparate audiences and on the young people of Z Generation, who are the subject of this investigation, are limited. The perspective of this empirical-qualitative investigation, conducted according to the peer instruction flipped classroom model, focused on this specific target audience perception and user experience, to fill an existing gap in the analysis on this topic, through the detailed analysis of 30 museum websites and 34 indicators. Despite the role that museums play in the cultural and tourist panorama, they are still considered unattractive for the younger generations, to the point that these young people are generally considered non-visitors, a segment not interested in expressing a demand for culture. This same target, however, would be able to express a good potential of interest if museums developed adequate digital strategies, offering engaging experiences of digital storytelling, gamification, interactivity, sociality, and virtual and augmented reality.