User-centered design and evaluation of multimodal tourist maps

Abstract

User-centred maps are designed to provide users with the geospatial information they need primarily by their interests and thus more powerful support for their geospatial decision-making. In many cases, creating this kind of maps involves designing maps at multiple modes. Tourism is one of the areas that various kinds of maps both analogue and digital are widely used. Well-designed tourist maps can contribute to increasing the attractiveness of a region and the satisfaction of the visitors. Although some applications are available on user-centred multimodal tourist maps for web and mobile environments, there is no comprehensive study dealing with the paper maps. Therefore, this article focuses on the design and production as well as the evaluation of user-centred multimodal tourist maps for the analogue environment in the case of Kyrenia (Girne) district of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The study consists of three main phases. In the first phase, a tourist geospatial database was constructed for the district of Kyrenia. In the second phase, user-centred multimodal tourist maps were designed and produced for three types of tourism, considering the prominent characteristics of the district in this respect. In the third phase, user evaluations were carried out for the existing and produced tourist maps. For this purpose, newly designed maps (as a group) and an existing tourist map of the district were evaluated individually and comparatively by potential users of different gender, age and education characteristics by face-to-face survey method. The survey results showed that the user-centred multimodal maps are more preferable than the general tourist map.