Design and Evaluation of a Personalized Mobile Tourist System

Abstract

Smartphones are rapidly evolving, making them powerful devices with many features. Location awareness is one of the hot topics, aiding applications to provide better services to users. A challenge is to combine the large amount of tourist information with the limited display sizes of smartphones. Also, tourists spend a lot of time nding information with little knowledge of their probable enjoyment of these tourist relevant locations. Recommender systems attempt to solve this by using information about users and points of interest. We will investigate several studies that discuss tourist applications.This project presents the Mobile Tourist Service Recommender which is a personalized tourist application introduced by [Wium, 2010]. We have further developed this system, performed thorough usability testing, applied the Mobile Services Acceptance Model, and analyzed the results.The results indicate that the system has potential and is encouraged by the positive feedback from many users. Users especially found the system to be benecial to them as tourists, and that they could use the system during vacations. Unfortunately, the achieved responses were not completely satisfactory to our goals, but further iterations with the suggested improvements implemented will raise the user experience.