Exploring multimodal navigation aids for mobile users

Abstract

When navigating in real physical environments, as human beings we tend to display systematic or near-systematic errors with distance, direction and other navigation issues. To avoid making these errors, we choose different stratategies to find our way. While there have been a lot of HCI studies of navigation design guidelines for using maps or speech-based or tactile-based guidance in mobile devices, in this paper we introduce an initial study of multimodal navigation design utilising the design practice of episodes of motion originated from urban planning. The implications of designing cues and providing rhythm, as the design guidelines of episodes of motions suggests, are explored in this study with the subjects being pedestrians with wayfinding tasks in an urban area. The main contributions of this paper are in evaluating the design implications in the context of mobile wayfinding tasks and in reflecting the results according to human wayfinding behaviour. It is concluded that by designing predictive clues and rhythm into mobile multimodal navigation applications, we can improve navigation aids for users. © 2009 Springer.