Building guidelines for UNESCO world heritage sites' apps

Technological improvements and access provide a fertile scenario for the creation and development of mobile applications. This scenario of intense production of new software for mobile devices results in a myriad of apps providing information about almost all the cultural segments, including those dedicated to UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS). However, not all of the apps have the same efficiency. In order to have a successful app, its development must consider usability aspects aligned with reliable content. Despite the guidelines for mobile usability being broadly available, they are generic, and none of them concentrates specifically in cultural heritage. This article aims to fulfil this literature gap and discusses how to develop specific guidelines for a better WHS experience. It uses an empirical approach applied to an open-air WHS city: Weimar and its Bauhaus and Classical Weimar sites. To build the guidelines, this research compared literature-based guidelines to industry-based ones, extracted from a vast compendium of available apps dedicated to WHS. The instructions compiled from both sources have been comparatively tested by using two built prototypes from the distinctive guidelines.