I recently visited Hawaii and was struck by the idea of Tourism Usability, which is my way to describe the way a tourist destination ensures that visitors are able to get around easily, find what they are looking for, and generally have a great time when they visit. Obviously there are tourism boards and the like that focus on these ideas, but I’ve never heard of actual usability concepts being applied in this arena. Giving “usability tests” to vacationers, although perhaps tricky from a logistical standpoint, just might yield some really useful results. Beyod that, studying the ideas that we apply to the web and beyond could be quite applicable to building great vacation destinations.

As is probably not all that surprising, this idea came to me based on some bad experiences, most notably with regards to Hawaiian street signage. On two seperate occasions, a road that we wanted to take was closed with no explanation and no detour instructions… Just a “Road Closed” sign! We were forced to get onto a different HIGHWAY with no idea of whether it would take us to our destination. Another time, as we were headed to Honolulu, we discovered that following signs that said Honolulu actually took us nowhere near where we were going. It occured to me that since tourism is Hawaii’s number one industry, they really should take more care that their signage be easy to understand and follow for people driving these roads for the very first time. Getting lost a bunch of times doesn’t really add to the quality of a vacation. (Of course, Hawaii has so many other things going for it, this didn’t really take too much away.)

Oh, and one other thing — If someone from the Hawaii tourism board is reading this and decides that they need a usability expert, you, um, have my email.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 7:47 pm and is filed under general tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.