Looking for that pop-up bar? – Search in your mapping-app-of-choice, hit “Directions”, and off to your drink with buddies, right? – Maybe.
A team of HCI researchers around (corresponding author) Johannes Schöning has investigated routing behaviour in pedestrians: The widely available turn-by-turn (TBT) directions are not the only type of instructions pedestrians use, in some settings not even the most popular one. The team compared the use of TBT instructions and the simple route overview or route preview (RP).
From Emanuel de Bellis’s post about the (open-access) paper:
When you walk somewhere with Google Maps, do you actually hit “Start” for turn-by-turn directions? Or do you just glance at the route on the map and figure it out yourself? 🗺️
Turns out, a surprisingly large number of people do the latter. In our new paper in PLOS ONE, 44% of surveyed users preferred the simple route preview over full turn-by-turn navigation. In familiar environments, that number jumped to 76%.
The study found no significant differences in navigation performance, nor in phone glance, nor in spatial learning between the two modes. I appreciated Emanuel’s take:
Turn-by-turn was built for drivers on fixed roads. Pedestrians are different. They take shortcuts, explore, change their minds. Step-by-step instructions ask them to switch off their spatial thinking, and over time, that’s a skill you lose. Route preview keeps people engaged: they read the map, orient themselves, make decisions.
Somewhat1 related: Sascha Brunner of the Esri R&D Center in Zurich has recently posted about navigation in 3D web scenes. Actual, fully free 3D navigation is powerful but often hard to use because of the unlimited degrees of freedom. Sascha:
So I tried a different question: how far can we get if we give the user less freedom and more help? To place that idea, it helps to compare the formats we already use to explain a route:
📍 Static 2D map → good overview, no terrain feel.
🖼 3D image → nice perspective, no movement.
🎬 Fly-through video → movement, but the author chooses everything.
🌍 Free 3D scene → full freedom, users get lost.
Each step gives the user more control and the author less.
None of these formats really answers the question “what does this route actually feel like?”. So I tried the middle: keep the camera on the path, give the user a play button, a slider, and a small look-around.
Of course: The research team and Sascha asked different questions. So it’s no surprise they arrive at different answers. But I found it neat that in the first case, the answer (or: an answer) can be to give the users more freedom, while in the second case, the tentative answer is the opposite.
Not new, but good to be reminded occasionally: It comes down to user needs and context.
Footnotes
Ok, maybe tangentially.↩︎