Jingying Niu and Jing Liu
Macau’s development as a World Centre of Tourism and Leisure has increased the need for museum digital services that support sustainable cultural tourism, visitor experience quality, and urban cultural resilience. Existing studies focus mainly on single museums or technologies and pay limited attention to cross-museum services across the full pre-visit, on-site, and post-visit journey. This study treats sustainability as the substantive research orientation, systemic design as the theoretical framing, and service design as the methodological path. It defines the cross-museum journey as the unit of analysis and interprets visitor-facing gaps as evidence of coordination problems among digital infrastructures, museum operations, human support, place-based access, and diverse visitor needs. The study combines user journey mapping, an adapted SERVQUAL model, and importance-performance analysis (IPA). Journey mapping locates breakdowns across stages and touchpoints; the adapted SERVQUAL model operationalises continuity, social sustainability, and trust; and IPA identifies high-importance, low-performance items as intervention priorities. To reflect the service conditions of sustainable cultural tourism, the framework adds a security dimension and reframes one service-quality dimension as Social Sustainability, producing a six-dimensional, 24-item model. A total of 165 questionnaires were collected, and the main analysis used 154 valid responses from visitors who had visited museums in Macau within the previous two years. The results identify three priority problems: unstable mobile interaction, weak help and problem-resolution pathways, and limited age-friendly, child-aware, and inclusive support. Their significance extends beyond technical performance because they disrupt continuity, inclusion, and trust across multiple stages of the journey. Based on the Macau case, the paper proposes a transferable full-journey improvement path centred on a unified digital entry point, stable interaction, human-machine collaboration, social-sustainability support, and post-visit continuity. It conceptualises sustainability in museum digital services as the process of sustaining continuity, inclusiveness, and trust across the visitor journey and offers a mixed-method framework applicable to other museum clusters and museums more generally.
Keywords: systemic design, museum digital services, sustainable cultural tourism, cross-museum journeys, social sustainability, user journey mapping