Over the past year, our laboratory, in cooperation with the Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Cartography, has had the pleasure of collaborating with USE-IT Europe on the Erasmus+ project DIG-IT: Creative Digitalization for Building a Community of Conscious Urban Youth Tourists.
The USE-IT network brings together creators of city maps designed by young people for curious, independent travelers. Each map is created bottom-up, initiated and developed by local communities who know their cities better than any commercial guidebook. USE-IT maps are non-commercial, regularly updated, and freely available. Since 2005, they have helped visitors discover authentic urban places while actively mitigating overtourism across European cities.
The main objective of the DIG-IT project was to develop a new digital platform for creating and managing USE-IT maps. This platform enables local teams to design interactive online maps as a complement to traditional printed versions. For the USE-IT network, digitalization represents a major step forward: it increases accessibility, allows for more flexible updates, and opens new opportunities for collaboration between cities across Europe.
Our role in the project focused on user research. We aimed to evaluate how users work with classic paper-based USE-IT maps and to conduct UX testing of the newly developed digital solution.
Using a remote eye-tracker, we first carried out a controlled laboratory study with 48 participants. The second phase moved beyond the lab and into the real urban environment. We employed mobile eye-tracking glasses and invited 10 international participants to the city of Brno, where they navigated the city using both the printed USE-IT map and the digital application.
For visualization and analysis of the results, we used GazePlotter, a tool developed in our department. This enabled us to identify individual behavioral patterns, navigation strategies, and key differences between analog and digital map use.
Finally, we were invited to the USE-IT conference in Nantes, where we had the opportunity to work directly with young cartographers and help them design clearer, more user-friendly USE-IT maps.
The key findings of the study are summarized in the following short video: