4. AN INNOVATIVE MOBILE ELECTRONIC TOURIST GUIDE
4.2. Designing the Multiplatform Tourist Guide Framework
One of the main design objectives of this project has been to provide tourist information via a web platform which would be readily available to users as a case of a pre-visit stage to the Municipal council. The main issue that was examined in the web application was how to make it obvious that users are able to adapt the web content into a personalized selection of content which would be dynamically ‘loaded’ into a customized ubiquitous mobile multimedia application.
Originally, the design of the platform was broken down into two separate systems:
o the web application and
o the mobile thick client application
A dynamic web application was designed and implemented, where, among other capabilities, users’ could preview POIs illustrated on a scalable
8 The multiplatform tourist framework project was jointly funded by the EU LEADER+ program, the Community Initiative Operational Program via ETAL S.A. and Municipality of Mytilene through the action 1.4.2.5 Signposting of sights, monuments, paths – mapping. In this project, Internet users may use the Mytilene e-guide to virtually navigate the Municipality of Mytilene, its monuments, museums and sights and get to know the history and the culture of the region as well as create a personalized e-guide for their mobile devices tailored to their individual interests.
Ajax-based map. The web application allows for users to dynamically select content of interest which the system then records and uses these selections to build a personalized mobile application. In the course of designing this dynamic web application, e-commerce concepts were used. The user tags content of choice, just as they might do with an “add to shopping cart”
function, before moving onto the “download now” sub-section just like the
“checkout” area of an e-commerce site. In this sub-section, the user is given the choice of downloading a customized mobile application to a PC first and then to the user’s mobile phone.
Whilst in the process of the “Download now” sub-section the user has the ability, although not compulsory, to create an account in order to save the list of selected content with the intent of reusing it at a later stage. If the user creates an account, upon returning and logging in, they are given access to their own personal profile pages. These are separate web pages where the users have access to a number of services i.e. viewing their entered personal information, viewing or editing the POI selection “cart”, using the comment and rating system and viewing and uploading photos via the web application or on the spot directly from their mobile device. The user can also use the recommendation system that is interconnected to their personal profile with the aim of adding new content to the selection ‘cart’. Clearly, users must create an account in order to have a personal profile. This is compulsory if users want to benefit from having a customized personal guide and access to extra services available via the mobile web (such services will be presented in Chapter 5).
During the early analysis stages of this tourist framework, two extra scenarios were anticipated. Firstly, the scenario of a visitor who has arrived on the island without previously having visited the web application in order to download the personalised mobile guide. Secondly, the scenario where a tourist does not possess the minimum required mobile device capabilities to use on their trip. The first scenario was anticipated in the form of an info kiosk installation which gave users access to the web application and the
ability to directly push the generated personal mobile application directly to user’s Bluetooth-capable phone. As for the second scenario, in cases where tourists did not possess the required mobile device or in cases where users were reluctant to use their own mobile device, a PDA installation was anticipated at the design stage. However, the Municipal lacked a WLAN installation, this led to the PDA installation having on-device storage, caching all POI data and it has a system for the centralized synchronization and recharging of all PDAs simultaneously.
Overall, the framework has been designed and implemented taking into account several usability guidelines from Section 2.3, as well as requirement results extracted from past experiments [37], [57], [66], which include:
o Both the web and mobile interface must be appealing to a wide range of users with various skills and expertise.
o The mobile application must include short and concise textual descriptions accompanied by pictures and multimedia content used to provide tourist information (e.g. museums, monuments, buildings, walking paths, etc.).
o Both web and mobile application presentations must follow a hierarchical multi-level structure that helps users to easily search for, browse and understand specific information tailored to their interest.
This design approach has been dictated by usability studies which have shown that a combination of summary and keywords of each document at first is more efficient in helping users locate relevant information from a list of documents than displaying entire documents directly [50].
o Menus should be consistently designed to secure easy access to the desired information [57]. Menus and buttons should be clearly labelled and consistent to help the user navigation, learnability and memorability. To minimize cognitive overload, long lists of choices have
been avoided and support has been added for backtracking and easy accessing of earlier pages/home page. Finally, the menus’ structure assist users to finish tasks with minimum interaction with the mobile device (e.g., scrolling and button clicks).