Electroencephalography and Self-assessment Evaluation of Engagement with Online Exhibitions: Case Study of Google Arts and Culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to have an unprecedented impact on museums and exhibition galleries worldwide, with online visitors to museums and exhibitions increasing significantly. The most common method used by web user experience researchers to study user engagement is questionnaires, usually conducted after the user has completed the website experience and relying on the user's memory and lingering feelings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new method of assessment based on a combination of user electroencephalography (EEG) signals and a self-assessment questionnaire (UES-SF). Since EEG signal measurement is a practical method to detect sequential changes in brain activity without significant time delays, it can comprehend visitors' unconscious and sensory responses to online exhibitions. This paper employed the Google Arts & Culture (GA&C) website as an example to study 4 different exhibition formats and their impact on user engagement. The questionnaire results showed that the "game interaction" was significantly higher (p < 0.05) in terms of participation than the "2D information Kiosks" and "3D virtual exhibitions" and was the marginally significant (0.05 < p < 0.10) than "video explanation". However, when we combined the EEG data, we could determine that "game interaction" had the highest user engagement, followed by "video explanation", "3D virtual exhibition", and the "2D information kiosk". Therefore, our new evaluation approach can assist online exhibition user experience researchers in understanding the impact of different forms of interaction on engagement more comprehensively.