City guide as a multi-sensory mobile phone application

2003

While tourism presents considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies, we currently have little understanding of how tourists organise their activities or of the problems they face. This paper presents an ethnographic study of city tourists' practices that draws out a number of implications for designing tourist technology. We describe how tourists work together in groups, collaborate around maps and guidebooks, and both 'pre-' and 'post-visit' places. Implications are drawn for three types of tourist technology: systems that explicitly support how tourists co-ordinate, electronic guidebooks and maps, and electronic tour guide applications. We discuss applications of these findings, including the Travelblog, which supports building travel-based web pages while on holiday.

2008

New mobile phones and navigation devices are very powerful. In this paper an ethnographic approach is used to gain insight in how one of these devices, a multimedia-phone with GPS, maps and a mobile guide is used by visitors to the city of Philadelphia. An interesting finding is that some of the visitors seem to substitute traditional information sources with the navigation and map-tool on the mobile device. Also, the study documents point of capture archiving of personal experiences by use of a mobile multimedia device.

Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2015

2023

The purpose of the article is to identify the city tourism app functions affecting the process of users' technology adoption. The article presents the issues related to tourism apps and the role thereof in building tourist experience, as well as selected models of technology acceptance. The paper goes on to discuss the results of a survey of selected Polish cities' tourism applications. Design/methodology/approach: For the purpose of the study, a critical analysis of the literature on the subject was carried out, followed by analysis of selected applications and a qualitative study of application users' comments. The study was conducted in accordance with the constructivist grounded theory. The process of user comment coding and analysis involved the use of the ATLAS.ti qualitative data analysis software. Findings: Based on the critical analysis of the literature and the survey of selected applications, a city tourism app functionality assessment model has been proposed. The need for urban app changes, to enhance the tourist experience, has been indicated as well. Research limitations/implications: The subject of the study comprised official city tourism applications. The survey encompassed applications which met the following criteria: the apps surveyed were official city apps, the potential thereof were tourists, the apps have been rated and commented. Practical implications: The results of the study can serve to increase the effectiveness of the promotional activities implemented by cities employing such applications to form relations with tourists. To a limited extent, they can also serve to facilitate the designing of apps intended for city residents. Social implications: The article draws attention to the issues of user involvement in the process of city tourism app development. The sphere of city applications can become a platform for tourist interaction, while the apps themselves can improve the quality of the tourists' experience as well as their functioning in the city. Originality/value: The article fills the research gap in the studies on city tourism apps. It draws attention to the necessity of taking the following into account when designing such applications: the specifics of the tourist experience as a process, consideration of the app as an element of the tourist's technological experience, accentuation of those app functions, which are crucial from the perspective of the app acceptance process.

The Open Knowlege Society. A …, 2008

Mobile guides have been in the spot light for the past decade or so they are becoming excessively available to tourists visiting places around the world. Most of which are to be used via a network connection on a browser based device and others as such as proprietary mobile applications, installed ondevice. As such, some guides are used as navigational assistants in large cities solely for exploratory services and others can be used indoors as museum guides. This paper researches past and present mobile guide applications using a detailed set of evaluation criteria to extract design principles which can be used by an application-designer or an application-developer.

Proceedings of the …, 2000

2000

In this paper, we describe our experiences of developing and evaluating GUIDE, an intelligent electronic tourist guide. The GUIDE system has been built to overcome many of the limitations of the traditional information and navigation tools available to city visitors. For example, group-based tours are inherently inflexible with fixed starting times and fixed durations and (like most guidebooks) are constrained by the need to satisfy the interests of the majority rather than the specific interests of individuals. Following a period of requirements capture, involving experts in the field of tourism, we developed and installed a system for use by visitors to Lancaster. The system combines mobile computing technologies with a wireless infrastructure to present city visitors with information tailored to both their personal and environmental contexts. In this paper we present an evaluation of GUIDE, focusing on the quality of the visitor's experience when using the system.