An Experiment to Discover Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Tourist Apps

Tourist apps can be very useful for sightseeing, and this is one of the reasons that makes them so numerous in app stores. Good usability can make the difference when choosing an app, from the user’s point of view, so this study is aimed at analyzing and discovering common usability issues in apps for tourism. This paper presents a research study with two objectives: analyzing the most common usability problems in mobile apps for tourism and proposing recommendations for improving the usability of those apps. The research process firstly identifies the main functionalities that tourist guides should have, by filtering the results obtained through the store. This was followed by a two-part experiment. The first part was a Keystroke Level Modelling analysis, where the number of taps needed to perform each main functionality in each tourist guide app was registered. Secondly, a heuristic evaluation was carried out on the best rated apps in the previous stage. Four usability experts tested the apps in real devices, by performing several tasks with a smartphone, and evaluated them according to some mobile heuristics. After this process, the most frequent usability problems in tourist guide apps were found, which allowed to discover recommendations for designing and developing mobile tourist guides. One of the recommendations is that tourist guide apps should provide at least the following functionalities: listing POIs (Points of Interest), showing information of a POI, selecting language, showing a map, working offline, and showing a tourist’s current location. Other recommendations proposed are, for example, showing relevant and complete information of POIs, such as opening hours and admission fees; showing more than one POI on the map and the distance to the tourist; and avoiding showing at the same time commercial information and tourist information.