Convenient Wayfinding in Historical Areas on Behalf of Tourists

Problem statement: heritage zone in Iranian cities or even other Islamic cities usually contains narrow and curvilinear paths which were made in regard to human-scale. Thus, these fabrics are not legible enough for tourist as they are not familiar with the environment. These make tourists to have difficulties find their way in these fabrics. Unsuccessful wayfinding process leads to confusion and anxiety among tourists. Some of the problems refer to lack and weakly location of visual cues. This study aims to enhance legibility in the core zone of Mashhad city. Enhancing the legibility leads to perform a convenient wayfinding among tourist from the origin to a destination point. Approach: A random size of 20 tourists was selected in the core zone of Mashhad City. They were asked about the difficulties they had and visual cues they used from the selected Hotel to The Holy Shrine (decision point). Data collected through mind mapping. Indeed, they were asked to draw the way they moved through to reach the destination point. Chi-square and Cramer’s V-Test was conducted for performance measures. Result: It is anticipated that tourists have difficulties in places there were few landmarks or they were not situated properly. Degree of familiarity among different participants leads to utilize different landmarks as visual cues in the site. Moreover, in curvilinear path participants might have more difficulties. Conclusion: utilizing visual cues in highly complex environment especially at decision points can improve wayfinding performances. Landmarks were by far the most predominant navigation cues, should be located where make decisions easier.