Abstract:

Museums tend to use text-based commentary to describe their exhibition sections, which makes it difficult for young children, foreigners, and people with disabilities to understand. To solve this issue, the Toyohashi Museum of Natural History added a manga-based commentary to the conventional textual explanation. However, user assessments have not been conducted on visitors yet. Therefore, the objective of this study is to compare and evaluate the usability of text-based and manga-based commentary and validate the advantage of manga in commentary panels. This study conducted two evaluation experiments. The first evaluation was conducted on September 14, 2019, to examine whether visitors read the text-based commentary panel or the manga-based commentary panel. The results from 62 participants showed that visitors from a range of age groups read the manga-based commentary. The second experiment was conducted on September 15–16, 2019, and it used manga-based commentary that featured a character. This was done to investigate participants’ differences in interest depending on whether the manga used a character. The commentary with a character had the character explaining the content in a speech bubble, while commentary without a character had narration enclosed in a rectangle within the frame explaining the content. The results from 95 participants showed that many visitors supported commentary with a character.

Keywords:

Manga, museum, sience communication, learner-centerd design.