Exploring Mobile Social Network Services For Tourists Based On Context-awareness

Travel service and information technology can be well combined. One of the outcomes is mobile tour guide system, which can help self-service tourists get information they want while travelling conveniently. However, there are two common questions within existing studies. One is that they seldom consider of tourists'social attributes, and the other is that they haven't developed potential of combining different context factors. Therefore, our research explores tourists' requirements generated while travelling, and tries to meet these requirements by fully digging out advantages of social network services based on mobile devices as well as context-awareness technology. Finally a mobile travel assistant system named "Happy trip" is designed, which has four main functions including recommendation, Q&A, comments and check-in.This research mainly adopts methods of user-centered design and includes five stages. The first stage is literature review, in which development of tourism industry is investigated and relevant literary researches are analyzed to get acquaintance of the possibility of combining social network and context awareness with travel service. The second stage is user research. Firstly determine target users, and then acquire users' demands while travelling with methods such as focus group, interview and competitive analysis. The third stage is concept design, in which scenarios of the system according to users'demands are designed and then main function points are extracted. Invite users to verify requirements on the system concept, and finally design the system functional structure. The fourth stage is interaction design. Design interaction process of each function, and simulate interaction of the system with paper prototype, and then invite users to confirm that whether the functional structure and interaction process meet their expectations. In addition, the paper makes innovative exploration on interaction mode on map-based interface, and proposes concepts of "Point", "Line" and "Plane". It is confirmed by user test that these innovative interaction modes can enhance interactive experience on map-based interface. The last stage is interface design and user evaluation, in which visual effects are added into improved paper prototype with Photoshop and Flash to get high-fidelity prototype, and then the final prototype is evaluated by satisfaction rating.The evaluation results show that users have high degree of satisfaction on interface and interaction design of "Happy trip" mobile travel assistant system and make good overall comments on the system. The system increases convenience of tourists' access to information while travelling, so that can make tourists get better travel experience.