User Management Techniques – Part 1

Move along sheeple!

How do you manage users on the trail?  They will be there, often without knowledge of the trail and its history.  Some will have no idea that different user groups are going to be there also.  So how can you make sure everyone has a good time?  How can you ensure everyone knows how to interact?
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The way to manage these experiences is known as “user management techniques”.  This article is the first in a series on user management techniques and how to use them for urban mountain biking.

Because even toys can get along on the trail.

​What are user management techniques?

First, we need to define what we mean when we say, “user management techniques”.  What we are referring to is really a set of tools and a series of choices we make in the trail layout, trail signage, kiosks and management that allow users to get along on the trail without any oversight.

What all these techniques seek to do is have the trail itself impose onto the users the correct method to use the trail.  That way it just feels “wrong” to use the trail in any other way than the prescribed management technique.  Humans rely as much on feeling as facts when negotiating unfamiliar spaces.  A paragraph of text will not get users to travel a certain direction more than users themselves feeling like they need to turn around.  The foundation of user management techniques then is comfort more than rules.

The goal is to get users to be able to navigate without any external inputs on the trail.  This is important as we are talking about trails that will primarily have two different user groups: hikers and mountain bikers.  Without some sort of management, these two user groups could become frustrated with on trail interactions with the other user group.  What may seem like a logical action to a hiker, for instance, might seem to be highly illogical to a mountain biker and vice versa.  If we can control user actions without them noticing, we can control their interactions.  If we can control their interactions, we can control their experiences to make them as positive as possible.

​What are the different kinds of user management techniques?

There are basically five (5) kinds of user management techniques.  They range from the least restrictive, meaning users just figure it out for themselves, to the most restrictive, meaning we will heavily impose order on the users.

Here are the techniques followed by a brief description:

• Shared Use – Few controls with little signage
• Preferred Use – The trail and signage will prefer one type of user group or another; there are 3 sub-versions of this use:
  • Hiker preferred – Bikers can be on the trail, but we want to minimize those types of users
  • Biker preferred – Hikers can be on the trail, but we want to minimize those types of users
  • Bike primary – Not one part of the trail is built for hikers, but they aren’t forbidden from the trail
• Segregated Use – Separate trails for separate user groups
• Hybrid Use – Trails switch from one to another user technique above at intersection points
• Boxed Use – Trails within a boundary are for a user group, trails outside that box are a different management technique

This will be the first in a series.  Each user management technique will be its own article.