9 User interaction in mobile navigation applications

Abstract

The chapter focuses on cooperation and interaction in multimodal route navigation and provides an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of multimodal interaction in location-based services in general. The goal of the research has been to study methods and techniques for richer human-computer interaction, and to investigate interconnection and user preferences concerning speech and tactile input modalities on a route navigation task. The chapter also surveys the work on a mobile navigation application which allows the user to query public transportation routes using speech and pen pointing gestures. The first version of the PDA-based navigation application, MUMS, has been developed with the Helsinki City public transportation as the domain, and the user can ask timetable and navigation information either by natural language questions or clicking on the map. On the basis of user studies, we also discuss the individual modalities and their influence in interactive applications.