Small details: using one device to navigate together

ABSTRACT

We present results from a study examining the sensitivity of group navigation strategies to changes in route presentation on a shared mobile device. Two content-equivalent interfaces are compared. An interface providing textual instructions linked to regions on a route map yields reliance on text primarily, encouraging route planning and a divide-and-conquer strategy we term 'navigator and scout'. An interface combining text instructions with map segments on individual pages yields less planning, still permits nav/scout, and sees an increase in an ad-hoc 'sync and go' strategy involving more gathering around the device. Finally, when the route map is used without text, the frequency of the nav/scout strategy drops markedly as sync and go increases.

REFERENCES

• 1: Reilly, D., Mackay, B. and Inkpen, K. How mobile maps cooperate with existing navigational infrastructure. In Meng, L., Zipf, A., Winter, S., Mobile Map-based Services. LNGC (2008)
• 2: Paul M. Aoki , Allison Woodruff, Improving electronic guidebook interfaces using a task-oriented design approach, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, p.319-325, August 17-19, 2000, New York City, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/347642.347779]
• 3: Barry Brown , Matthew Chalmers, Tourism and mobile technology, Proceedings of the eighth conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p.335-354, September 14-18, 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• 4: Helen Cole , Danaë Stanton, Designing mobile technologies to support co-present collaboration, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, v.7 n.6, p.365-371, December 2003 [doi>10.1007/s00779-003-0249-4]
• 5: Areti Galani , Matthew Chalmers, Production of pace as collaborative activity, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.986079]
• 6: Paul Luff , Christian Heath, Mobility in collaboration, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.305-314, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289505]
• 7: Alexandra Weilenmann , Catrine Larsson, Local use and sharing of mobile phones, Wireless world: social and interactional aspects of the mobile age, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 2001

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
group navigation, mobile maps, sharing mobile phones