Performance and Content Cues in Digital Heritage Interpretation: A Cross-Country Comparison of the Digital Visitor Experience

Abstract

Digital interpretation at heritage sites is usually measured as a single experience construct. This study treats it as emitting two classes of evidence, procedural evidence about how the system behaves and substantive evidence about what it asserts, which visitors weight separately when forming satisfaction. The model is tested on 1000 visitors at World Heritage attractions in China and 989 in the United States, using multigroup structural equation modeling after establishing configural, metric and scalar invariance. The two samples differ moderately in the size of the indirect effect of digital provision on satisfaction and on recommendation intention, and almost completely in its composition: procedural evidence carries 75% of the effect on satisfaction in China and 9% in the United States, where authenticity judgements dominate, and satisfaction converts into recommendation intention about twice as strongly among Chinese visitors. Monte Carlo intervals show that the difference in composition is estimated with precision and that the totals are not statistically equivalent. The composition of an effect, read alongside its size, emerges as the more informative object of comparison for heritage managers deciding whether to invest in the performance of a digital system or in the credibility of its content; the allocation implications are advanced as propositions rather than as tested rules.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Heritage, 2026 · DOI ↗