So the Major idea, oooooo, the idea is to create an interactive London underground tube map for the 800,000 tourists arriving in London for 2012 Olympics. The map will be specifically aimed at this target audience however people from all background and even those who live in London will be able to use the map. Currently there is not a fully interactive map out there, there are journey planner which my map will include, however currently on the TFL website a PDF download is available to anyone wanting current information in another language. This puts the 800,000 tourists at a disadvantage if they don’t know English. My map will be mainly constructed using symbols, as it’s the only global language. Other functions of the map will include using it to find top tourist destinations, venues of the Olympics and much more. All the information a tourist could want will be in one place, on one interactive map.
My research was fairly intense, I have contacted TFL and STILL waiting for their reply, but my research has really found this gap, where tourists sites are advising tourists to get the tube map from another source other than TFL as its not very efficient and take a while to download. This really is not acceptable from TFL; they should offer the best source of the information. I also found that tourists are told that the tube map is not as tourist-friendly as other countries, then to find a quote from TFL themselves announcing that the map has lost its simplicity, I feel I really have struck gold. However this is a big project to take on, and I’m still very much learning the code and processes needed to complete this project.
Thomas
