Relationships between Methods for Presenting Information on Navigation Tools and Users' Wayfinding Behavior

Abstract

This study examines the effects of different methods for presenting navigational information on users' wayfinding behavior and spatial memory. In the first experiment, we examined tools that differed in the degree to which they induced the user to engage in deliberate route planning. We found that users of a tool that showed a route to the goal (the route tool) had a poor scene-recognition memory and simply followed the directed route, compared to users of a paper map which did not show a route. A tool that showed the direction toward the goal (the direction tool) was equivalent to the route tool with respect to users’ scene-recognition memory, but allowed users to take routes more varied than the route tool and as varied as the paper map did. The direction tool affected men and women differently, inducing the latter to make more turns. Our second experiment examined the effects of the size of the device screen, and found that the map’s advantage of allowing the user to attend to their surroundings diminished when the map was shown in small size. We discuss implications for designing effective navigational aids in different situations.