  Virtual museums aim to promote access to cultural artifacts. However, they
often face the challenge of getting audiences to read and understand a large
amount of information in an uncontrolled online environment. Inspired by
successful practices in physical museums, we investigated the possible use of
guiding questions to engage audiences in virtual museums. To this end, we first
identified how to construct questions that are likely to attract audiences
through domain expert interviews and mining cultural-related posts in a popular
question and answer community. Then in terms of the proactive level for
attracting users' attention, we designed two mechanisms to interactively prompt
questions: active and passive. Through an online experiment with 150
participants, we showed that having interactive guiding questions encourages
browsing and improves content comprehension. We discuss reasons why they are
useful by conducting another qualitative comparison and obtained insights about
the influence of question category and interaction mechanism.
