Taking Culture as the Axis to Discuss User Experience in Tour Guide Mobile Application of Taichung City

Many existing tour guide Mobile Applications provide the information of attractions, but lack deep presentation and introduction to culture, places, scenery, and humanities. This study therefore intends to explore the deep cultural heritage in old Taichung City, expecting that visitors could experience the history and culture through the design of the tour guide Mobile Application. Taichung City presents rich cultural heritage. A lot of historical local ancient buildings evidence the boom and change of Taichung, present unique cultural appearance, and become the cultural symbols of Taichung. It is a pity that such features are seldom mentioned in existing Taichung City tour guide web pages and applications. To have visitors to Taichung receive more humanistic experiences, the Taichung City tour application is developed and designed with the cultural content as the axis to enhance visitors’ desire for exploring Taichung local history and culture as well as the deep understanding so as to further realize the cultural content and value of Taichung. This study aims to collect and analyze the attractions in Taichung area, integrate and induce the cultural characteristics based on such information, and design the culture-centered Taichung tour guide Mobile Application as well as evaluate user experience in the Taichung tour guide Mobile Application. The research methods contain 1. applying the analyses of anthropology and culture theory [1] and city image theory [2] and integrating the interview of culture and history workers and the actual reconnaissance contents, 2. integrating above contents as well as inducing and extracting historical stories and highlights with Taichung cultural characteristics for integrating into the Taichung tour guide Mobile Application, 3. thinking about visitors’ (people) instinctive behaviors and senses about exploring above-mentioned special historical stories and highlights of Taichung to develop the Application RP, 4. outputting the Application RP, and 5. recruiting users to participate in the test to evaluate the Application RP and collect user feedback. This study is expected to improve the cultural shortage of existing tour guide Mobile Applications. The development and design of the Taichung tour guide Mobile Application would provide tourist experience with humanistic value for visitors. According to the feedback, it would be continuously optimized for users’ better experiences. The successive studies, according to the research results, could propose cultural tour programs for different places.