Developing an Augmented Reality Tourism App through User-Centred Design (Extended Version)
This work addresses usability problems for tourists using AR apps, but it is incremental as it applies existing user-centred design methods to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled usability issues in augmented reality tourism apps by developing an Android app using user-centred design, resulting in a system that 20 users found usable and intuitive during a tourism task in a UK city.
Augmented Reality (AR) bridges the gap between the physical and virtual world. Through overlaying graphics on natural environments, users can immerse themselves in a tailored environment. This offers great benefits to mobile tourism, where points of interest (POIs) can be annotated on a smartphone screen. While a variety of apps currently exist, usability issues can discourage users from embracing AR. Interfaces can become cluttered with icons, with POI occlusion posing further challenges. In this paper, we use user-centred design (UCD) to develop an AR tourism app. We solicit requirements through a synthesis of domain analysis, tourist observation and semi-structured interviews. Whereas previous user-centred work has designed mock-ups, we iteratively develop a full Android app. This includes overhead maps and route navigation, in addition to a detailed AR browser. The final product is evaluated by 20 users, who participate in a tourism task in a UK city. Users regard the system as usable and intuitive, and suggest the addition of further customisation. We finish by critically analysing the challenges of a user-centred methodology.