Evaluating Museum Environment Composition Containing Digital Media Interaction to Improve Communication Efficiency

As a cultural tourism destination, museums offer opportunities for educational and exploratory experiences to all individuals. This aligns with the universal design, a concept including seven principles aimed at ensuring that everyone can equally enjoy visiting museums, facilities, and services. This paper aims to develop a framework for assessing the impact of digital media interaction on the museum exhibition environment and on visitor behavior, employing universal design principles to enhance the efficiency of museum visits. Five museums, each representing different styles, were chosen as case studies from the newly constructed cultural tourism museums in China to achieve this research objective. Qualitative and quantitative data provide a detailed picture of each exhibition hall from the perspective of visitors and demonstrate the advantages of using the 7UD evaluation framework. The results of the environmental measurements demonstrate how the display environments of the five museums are constructed in different ways. The issues identified include the lack of specific guiding information or poor location of the digital media within the exhibition environment, obstacles in the main communication spaces, and overcrowding, which reduces the efficiency of visits. The results, based on the 7UD evaluation checklist, indicated that the environment, when combined with the digital media, which has more problems and barriers, and corresponds to lower 7UD scoring rates. The evaluation framework based on 7UD captures the visitors’ interactive behaviors with exhibits through detailed indicators and meticulous data collection. These findings identify issues and visiting obstacles present in the museum exhibition environment influenced by digital media and confirm that the seven principles of Universal Design can be applied to the hypothesized problems to find potential solutions. The results directly support the further development of the exhibition design.