Indico is a bike evaluation system that collects experiences, reviews and evaluations. All through indexes differentiated by categories of interest. Indico is a service dedicated to the Sun Cycle Route, which aims to integrate the opinions of experts to those of the visitors to facilitate a simple and effective planning of the route, convincing even the most skeptical to take a trip along the cycle path.
A new tourist trend that saw an increase during the pandemic period that of cycling tourism, a highly sustainable practice from the environmental and social point of view.
Compared to other experiences in fact a practice that brings man to nature, in most found that the drive to adopt the bicycle as a sustainable means promotes the sense of aggregation and belonging to a community, the improvement of the quality of life and well-being of the individual.
In this context, we develop Indico: a service dedicated to cycling, which aims to integrate the expert opinions to those of the visitors to facilitate simple and effective planning of the path, convincing even the most skeptical to embark on a journey by approaching them practices of sustainable mobility.
For each user it is a circular experience: users, who want to plan a cycling trip, based their choices on a system of indicators divided into categories describing physical and experiential characteristics of the paths.
To each indicator corresponds to a quantitative evaluation given a priori and then integrated with the qualitative feedback that each user invited to provide through a gamification system. To use the service in fact a simple and intuitive application, with a playful design and strongly characterized from customization. An evaluation system like the one proposed, a valid tool monitoring of the services offered, with the aim of providing critical information for planning policy and future investments.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
One of Indico’s primary goals is to convince even the most skeptical to embark on a cycling trip. While many people appreciate this type of travel, this is sometimes complicated by the lack of precise indications and correspondences with reality, such as travel times, road conditions, etc. The aim is therefore to bring as many people as possible to the practice of cycling tourism, which can be born as a simple hobby but with time can become more and more a good daily practice that aims at zero Pollution. More generally, the infrastructure needed for cycle routes is often chosen on the basis of sustainable objectives: in fact, almost never new routes are built but rather the reuse of existing infrastructure is aimed.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
The strong point of the service is that of customization and gamification within the application, it is in fact a system that adheres to the needs of the individual user based on the use that the latter makes. The user can customize a series of indicators investing the points earned through the feedback provided, in this way the evaluation system is customized making the app a real personal guide, a reliable travel companion. If the user wants a detailed customization, he must contribute with his opinions and experiences, growing in this way also as an evaluator so as to be recognized as an active user certified by the system and by the community. Through the latter it will be possible to share itineraries with the relative evaluations with other users who may decide to follow the same path and who will therefore rely on the information acquired through the app and why not also decide to share a traveling. The better the quality of the experience for the user, the greater the benefits for the side-by-side services to the cycle itself, with a view to shared growth.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
From the point of view of the inclusion and involvement of citizens there will be the opportunity for users to provide feedback on their experiences being involved in the process of evaluating the services offered, on the basis of which the interventions by the managers will be planned. To encourage the involvement of more types of users, those who will be subscribed to the service may be entitled to unlock one indicator every two friends brought to Indico, without the need to go from a review and the consequent collection of points. In this sense, the idea of shared growth is strengthened: not only is the community that uses the app growing thanks to the promotion, but also the customization and therefore the accuracy of the individual user experience of the application grows because an indicator is unlocked. In this way it is also facilitated those who struggle to unlock indicators because it tends to make more rarely longer trips than those who travel little and often. Accessibility to cycling experiences is guaranteed through the development of a support to monitor, plan and evaluate the routes to be covered. In addition, a set of indicators that make up the evaluation system is specifically aimed at the accessibility of the paths, relating to different categories of users and services offered along the routes.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
For Indico, some categories have been chosen, each containing different indicators that could be interesting to be evaluated by as many cyclists as possible. The peculiarity of this protocol that the indicators are not only searchable by users, but integrate the data proposed by the management to the opinion of cyclists who then can interact with the protocol itself so that different subjectiit are comparable. a table has been drawn up
formed by seven categories with different indicators each: the environmental impact, the flows of the cycle path and the safety along the path have several indicators that are only searchable by the user, being more objective data but still interesting. The experience, the safety, the services of the cycle path, the accessibility and the morphology of the route are instead those
categories in which each index is integrable by an objective data value calculated by the management and a value obtained from user ratings. For all seven categories it will be possible to display a total value, sum of the value of the individual indicators, and the values of each index regarding a specific section of the cycle path or the entire cycle path, depending on what you want to visualize and evaluate.
The service collects in a single application the useful information for the planning of the bike trip that would usually be scattered in different web resources (forums, blogs and mainstream evaluation systems). In addition to offering different functionalities, customizable way, through a playful experience.
Another innovative feature is to be able to access not only a priori data from the system or the result of subjective reviews but based on the integration of quantitative and qualitative evaluations indexed.
The name of the service stems from the idea of shared growth between users and the service itself. In this sense, promotional campaigns are even more important to ensure an ever greater diffusion of Indico and are distributed through three channels: physical, digital and directly internal to the application.
As for the press campaign, these are visuals proposed through posters, banners and posters placed along the entire infrastructure of the cycle path and at the points of interest, as well as in key cities crossed, or published in trade magazines.
Indico will be promoted by the management of the cycle route itself as an evaluation system used by cyclists and cyclists to improve the monitoring of experiences and as an added decision-making tool for those looking for information on routes. For this reason, an increasing quantity and quality of information and data gives an added value to the cycle path and above all proposes a positive message on sustainable mobility so that it can become a healthy habit as can be the cycling and bicycle in dedicated infrastructure. Press campaigns will be accompanied by promotions on the various social networks, an inevitable and very successful practice. In the social profiles of Indico there will be periodic, weekly or monthly columns, differentiated according to the social
which will promote the service along with tips and curiosities for cyclists and cyclists.
Still, the service will promote itself by ensuring every user the internal possibility
to the app to invite friends to use the app itself.
In order to develop this tool both as an evaluation system and as a decision support and planning, the generation of real rankings based on feedback
acquired encourage the formation of strong partnerships and cooperation. In fact, service managers
will be able to collaborate in the development of this system that could become a certification tool through which it is possible to determine the quality levels of the experiences offered. A further development will be to collect the most frequented routes and
most appreciated by inserting them into real tourist guides that will be provided to cyclists and can be used as promotional tools.
@Baroncini, 2022
Content licensed to the European Union.