Woden Valley Walks

Woden Valley Walks is your pocket tourist guide for Canberra's Woden Valley.

Welcome to Woden Valley Walks (WVW).

This is Millturn IT's first foray into a Trail Guide. We've built this app primarily as a way of understanding what makes a great trail guide. Our guides are useful both indoors (for exploring museums and galleries) and outdoors (such as in Botanic Gardens and parks). We'd love you to give it a try and give us some all feedback.

Woden Valley Walks currently contains two walks in the Hughes and Curtin suburbs. Our aim was to deepen walkers' understanding of their surroundings by highlighting historical, natural and artistic points of interest. However, we don't want to detract from the walking experience itself so much as give walkers access to useful and interesting information on their mobile devices - when they want it and relevant to their current location.

Built in the 60s both Hughes and Curtin are full of mature exotic trees that provide shade in the summer, glorious colour in the Autumn and light in the winter (plus enormous piles of leaves for the kids to play with). Both walks will take you past a variety of these trees and some native planting on the jogging loop. We've pointed out the remains of the WW1 soldier settlement era, which are also reflected in some of the street and place names of the area. Other attractions like cafes and bookshops are included.

We're keen to know what you want to know - and how an app can improve and enhance your walking experience. We plan to keep enhancing this app as feedback comes in. It will continue to be an experiment in what makes a useful and valuable trail guide. Some future ideas are:

• adding an audible alarm upon approaching a point of interest

• allowing the user to hear information being read out as they approach a point of interest, rather than having to read the text themselves (and generally ensuring content is accessible to all)

• allowing users to contribute their own points of interest, which are then available to other walkers (once approved)

• making the content available in a variety of languages

• providing more of a particular type of content, for example “Where are the public toilets?!”

• categorising points of interest (e.g. historical, public art, amenities)