Guiding Along
The Presidents Trail

Creating a sophisticated navigational experience for the city of Quincy

Team: Aamil Amin / Rohan Tandon / Yue Yu

Project Overview

“The Presidents Trail” brings together a unique and diverse collection of 12 historic sites in Quincy in Massachusetts. Ranging from Presidential homes to local historical monuments, each location along the trail offers unique entry points and connections to the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Presidential history of Massachusetts and the United States. The Presidents Trail is a historic heritage experience in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Meeting with Mayor Thomas P. Koch was an incredible opportunity to ask questions and comprehensively understand the Presidents Trail initiative. My team practiced direct observation, captured several photos and videos of sites, locations, situations along the trail.

Goals

1. How to make people want to move forward along the trail?

It is important to consider people’s interest to walk the trail, to stay on course and continue walking the trail

2. How to enhance and create attractors to facilitate trail exploration?

Trail exploration is very crucial, therefore, identifying interesting points along the trail is also important

3. How can the trail be like a book that a visitor reads while walking along the trail?

Being aware of your whereabouts and being informed about places you visit enhances the experience

Background & Research

• Community engagement is truly what makes a public initiative successful. The interactive experience of the trail can help people learn about the former U.S. Presidents and how Quincy is a significant part of U.S. history. A good trail experience must be simple, seamless, yet informative and interesting.

• For our initial research, we created a questionnaire. Then, we interviewed people we found walking along the President’s Trail for their views on the trail. As we walked through the trail, we took pictures and noted the distance between each landmark, the number of stop signs we came across, and the number of times people had to wait to cross the road.

Insights from Research

Pain Points

The current map is confusing to understand

• The current map displayed on the President’s Trail website & brochure is confusing to understand and inefficient. It can cause visitors to get lost easily while walking on the trail. While walking the trail, we had to refer to two different maps. An ideal map would make it simple to understand distance between each of the landmarks.

Navigating through the trail was a huge pain point for us

• We had to use Google Maps and the map from the visitor’s center tomake sense of the proper route. It was challenging to find some of the additional sites along the trail. It was hard to learn about the history of the landmarks (especially the ones with no signage on them)

It was tough to stay motivated

• Our experience was a result of walking the whole trail with confusing maps, frequent stops at traffic lights, and lack of information about the landmarks. The Old House was particularly confusing to spot, as the signboard is placed farther from the actual spot and located a few steps off the trail illustrated on the map.

Design Proposals

1. All-New Crosswalk Design

   Reimagined crosswalk design to create a unique President's Trail branding as well as provide a better sense of direction.

2. Totem Signs

We designed a signage custom to the President's Trail. The rotatable cube on the top allows visitors to see the signage even if they walk from different directions. We tried to design the signage functional, yet interesting at the same time. The built-in lightbox allows the sign to be noticed in a dark environment.

3. Augmented Reality Experience

These design proposals create a cohesive system that provides an ultimate navigational experience.