ToARist: An Augmented Reality Tourism App created through User-Centred Design
This work addresses usability challenges for tourists using AR apps, but it is incremental as it applies existing UCD methods to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled usability issues in augmented reality tourism apps by developing ToARist through user-centred design, resulting in a functional app that 20 participants found usable but noted technical disruptions.
Through Augmented Reality (AR), virtual graphics can transform the physical world. This offers benefits to mobile tourism, where points of interest (POIs) can be annotated on a smartphone screen. Although several of these applications exist, usability issues can discourage adoption. User-centred design (UCD) solicits frequent feedback, often contributing to usable products. While AR mock-ups have been constructed through UCD, we develop a novel and functional tourism app. We solicit requirements through a synthesis of domain analysis, tourist observation and semi-structured interviews. Through four rounds of iterative development, users test and refine the app. The final product, dubbed ToARist, is evaluated by 20 participants, who engage in a tourism task around a UK city. Users regard the system as usable, but find technical issues can disrupt AR. We finish by reflecting on our design and critiquing the challenges of a strict user-centred methodology.