8 A survey of multimodal interfaces for mobile mapping applications

Abstract

The user interface is of critical importance in applications providing mapping services. It defines the visualisation and interaction modes for carrying out a variety of mapping tasks, and ease of use is essential to successful user adoption of a mapping application. This is redoubled in a mobile context, where mobile device limitations can hinder usability. In particular, interaction modes such as a pen/stylus are limited and can be quite difficult to use in a mobile context. Moreover, the majority of GIS interfaces are inherently complex and require significant user training, which can be a serious problem for novice users such as tourists. We propose an increased focus on developing multimodal interfaces for mobile GIS, allowing for two or more modes of input, as an attempt to address interaction complexity in the context of mobile mapping applications. Such interfaces allow users to choose the modes of interaction that are not only most intuitive to them, but also most suitable for their current task and environment. This chapter presents the user interaction problem and the utility of multimodal interfaces for mobile GIS. We describe our multimodal mobile GIS CoMPASS which helps to address the problem by permitting users to interact with spatial data using a combination of speech and gesture input. CoMPASS is set in the context of a representative survey across a range of comparable multimodal systems, and the effectiveness of our approach is evaluated in a user study which demonstrates that multimodal interfaces provide more intuitive and efficient interaction for mobile mapping applications.