## 1 Introduction  
Today more and more museums are embracing the digital challenge, but there is not yet a real and shared awareness of how to make virtual and real contents interact and how to design the best experience for the public, aiming at cultural transmission. Despite the great contribution that multimedia, virtual reality and mixed reality can offer to the museum sector, many curators still seem rather reluctant to benefit from the full potential of these languages, especially in permanent outfitting. They often capture those aspects that are more compatible with the traditional didactic approach, remaining suspicious especially towards the emotional components of narration. To tell a story, in fact, means to formulate a hypothesis which implies the creation of a possible \"reconstruction\", related to both the physical aspect of the cultural heritage and its contexts, the human activities, behaviors, thoughts, values. A story is a bridge between reality and imagination [1]. Usually museum curators prefer to be \"neutral\" regarding the artifacts, and they avoid to tell or to suggest the visitors anything else beyond the pure evidence in the form of captions or descriptions. On the other hand, despite the professionalisms working in the digital domain are rapidly growing and greatly specializing their skills, digital creators working for museums are not always aware about the design of an appropriate user experience for the museum's communication needs, aiming at a harmonious use of technology with respect to the contents, visit paths and target. Thus, the exhibited collections remain lacking in legibility, contextualization and pertinent narration. The purpose this work aims at is to propose best practices and guidelines on \"experience design\" for museums, focusing on different typologies of experiences, connected to different technologies, interactive or not, immersive or not, and different \"scenarios\" of use. It is addressed to those working on the experience design of museum visitors, curators and creative, as a survey of existing approaches and lessons learnt for each one, that can lead to an advancement in this filed. The contribution of this research comes from the author's academic background as art historian and expert in preservation of cultural heritage and from her long research experience, since 1998, at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies and at the Institute of Technologies Applied to the Cultural Heritage, both part of the National Research Council in Italy, where she has being dealing with cultural heritage documentation and communication using digital technologies. Several virtual museums, multimedia and virtual reality projects has been conceived and realized by the author, together with her research group, experimenting new narrative forms and interaction paradigms, and they have been addressed to diverse audiences of real museums and cultural sites, in Italy and in Europe. From many years this experience has being accompanied and supported by user experience evaluations on thousands of visitors, to test the effective impact of such projects. The continuous outcomes are extremely useful to have a better understanding of the public, of the benefits and the limits of the proposed solutions, and therefore they constantly help to increase awareness and to improve our research. On this base some priority objectives of the \"experience design\" intended for the museum's public are here defined and proposed, and they constitute the \"leitmotiv\" of this paper:  
* improvement of the integration between virtual and real contents of the museum, in order to make them synergic and harmonious with the space, the paths, the visitors' needs;
* hybridization of media, bringing together different paradigms and languages of \"representation\" (virtual reality, theater, cinema, sound and light design, mixed and augmented reality, holography, game), in order to involve and guide the visitor through a vivid and incisive narrative cultural experience.