SALISA JATUWEERAPONG

Venice's main economic industry is tourism. Yet everyone—businesses, locals, and even other tourists—hate Venice tourists, because they're everywhere. 

Overcrowding in Venice is largely a problem of congestion in major areas, and lack of wayfinding in others. By building a wayfinding system for Venice, we would be able to have better control over traffic flows, and provide a more pleasant experience to all Venice go-ers. 

*We would've wanted to explore overtourism in Venice, but that was out of scope for this brief. 

Though we were mostly constrained to secondary research, we looked into a variety of sources: 

Tourists come to Venice looking for different things.

For the Solo Tourist, we want to provide an authentic Venice experience. This tourist is engaged with the local history, and is fit to schedule packed days.

For a Family Tourist, we want to provide a relaxing trip that caters to all the family member’s needs. They may want to rest often, and are less picky about their destinations.

We developed scenarios & user journeys for these personas to understand the niche ways each deal with their frustrations. 

(Full design research can be shown upon request; link to our personas document)

1. No coherent visual identity // Wayfinding signage around the city is often haphazard. Street signs are painted on walls, and can differ between districts.

2. Lack of useful arrival information // Newly arriving tourists commonly find themselves lost, overwhelmed, and confused. While wayfinding information exists at arrival points, a lot of it will not apply to the travellor due to their specific wants and needs. Paper maps provided at this point also don’t indicate dead ends.

3. Scattered access to information // There is an overprovision of information at main arrival points to the city. Comparatively, the rest of the city has little wayfinding information.

4. Easy to get lost // It’s hard to know where you are!

5. On a budget! // Transit in Venice can get very expensive if you don’t buy the correct passes. Every traveller wants to save where they can.

i. Unreliable GPS system // Due to Venice’s tightly winding streets and dead ends, GPS is not always accurate, and compasses aren’t useful

ii. Unhelpful locals // Tourists will unlikely be able to rely on locals for wayfinding help

iii. Travel by foot // The main mode of transportation across Venice is by walking. This combined with the many bridges, steps, and hard-to-traverse crowds make planning out an optimal path necessary. 

1. Create a cohesive brand identity for Venice's wayfinding assets

2. Establish a wayfinding system in Venice that will help users go where they want to go. 

3. With the confidence of a trusted wayfinding system,  encourage users to travel to lesser known parts of Venice. 

Our rationale for going digital is that Venice is very limited in terms of physical real estate. A digital solution allows us to manipulate the digital layer of the city, and using new technologies we can still pinpoint user location without GPS. A digital solution also means that any news or updates can be quickly pushed directly to tourists’ phones, without the delay of having to maintain and reinstall physical maps.

We will still be introducing physical signage and wayfinding within the city, though everything will link back to the digital app.

We believe that the modern lost tourist is a tech-savvy individual familiar with this method of wayfinding, and we propose that this app be advertised as the main wayfinding solution for Venice on their official sites, which would lead to widespread adoption by tourists. 

The intinerary option makes it easy to plan in advance and save route options.

Pitstops and routes are recommended based on your needs stated from the survey. For example, the app would recommend a waterbus ride for a family with young children, while a solo tourist could simply walk.

1. Copywriting // Our copy has a lot to be desired. While our tone is consistently friendly, our language wasn’t. I’d like to develop a word list and content matrix to have consistent CTAs.

2. Colour usage // Currently, each colour represents a district, but colours on the app UI are used almost randomly. They’re consistent in that pink is always for tickets, etc, but I think we could do some card sorting to test associations. 

We did do an accessibility check on our colours, so go us!

3. Stronger cultural significance // One solution I greatly enjoyed from the Venice Smart City report was a speculative design using coloured tiles (with traditional Venitian designs) to lay out popular paths. I found that our branding was lacking a cultural tie to Venice, and that the solution overall may have been functional, but somewhat generic.

Perhaps something that tied more into local shops and their idea of landmarks being mundane objects would’ve been cool!

4. More exploration with AR navi? // We considered but ultimatedly discarded AR navigation solutions since we had difficulting articulating a strong use case for tech with high battery consumption while battery is a travel constraint.
We thought schools of coloured fishes leading you to your destination would be super cute though. 

Assuming we launch a revised iteration of this system, here are some metrics I’d want to track:

1. Dead end signs scanned. // By mapping those, wwed be able to track where users were commonly getting lost. We could then pinpoint where to add more signs.

2. App downloads v. numbers of tourists.

3. Trip rating. // At the end of a trip, we should prompt users to do a short survey, with questions about which app features were most helpful and how often they used the app.