With FlorenceTube, visiting Florence is easy as getting a city metro tube.
You can plan your trip at home, then – while in Florence – you can “hop on and hop off” at each station, visiting the surrounding points of interest, and reading the contents produced by the Municipality Offices.
Each line of the touristic FlorenceTube virtual metro is a specific visiting path with a dedicated theme. A line is composed of stations, and each station is composed of points of interest.
Lines can cross each other, so that a station can lead to other intersecting visiting paths. Therefore, there are multiple ways to interact with digital contents through the paradigm of paths and stations.
When the app is launched, the available tube lines are offered.
When tapping on a line, the specific details for that line will be presented: duration of the path, number of stations, general information on that line.
Each line is the very heart of the application, allowing to rapidly reach the stations and to have a glance at the distance among them.
Each station crossing other lines allows to access to the other lines themselves.
On an interactive map it is possible to reach the single stations and to read the main information of its corresponding points of interest. Each element can be bookmarked as Favorite point.
By tapping on a station name, it is possible to access to the details.
A station is a node on a line, a relevant place which can correspond to one or more “points of interest”.
In the details view the map with surrounding points of interest are presented, together with corresponding contents.
It is possible to scroll stations and related contents sequentially.
Points of interest are listed in the section “Find here”.
The page is rich of media contents, and will contain details and other information.
In the “ME” section, two types of content are available: the “Favorites” and the “My Tube”, the personalized line.
When tapping to the heart-shaped icon, the element is added to “Favorites”. It is possible to bookmark a point of interest, a station, or a whole line.
Each element of Favorites can also be added to “My Tube”, by pinning the element.
The “My Tube” section contains the Favorites stations and points of interest.
From this section it is possible to launch a travel path: each element can be added or removed from the personalized line by tapping the corresponding marker aside to the station icon.
In the map view the line is presented within a walking distance-view, and it is also possible from the map to activate or deactivate the points of interest.
The corresponding modified path is re-calculated in realtime in the map.
It is possible to log-in and to sync in cloud the Favorites, thus using them from other devices: a user can login with the City of Florence 055055 digital identity, or with his/her preferred social network IDs.
The app offers to search capabilities. The first is an Around Me that lets the user to select only specific spots (museums, historical buildings, etc). The second is text-search through keywords: results are shown in order of relevance and can be viewed and filtered on the map.