Understanding users’ strategies with mobile maps

A fundamental cognitive challenge to users of mobile maps is to construct an adequate mental representation of the oneto-one mapping between locations in the digital and physical spaces. Understanding this mapping underlies many map-based tasks such as identification, recognition, orientation, and navigation. In this paper, we present results from a field experiment conducted to understand how users solve the problem with 2D and 3D mobile maps. We present verbal protocols and interviews on their strategies, reconceptualize mapping as problem-solving activity, and sketch a tentative model of mobile map interaction. Here, the focus is not to describe how people match cues with target descriptions (feature match) but how they meaningfully interact with the two spaces to achieve a position in which the cues can be matched in the first place. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we focus on one key problem with mobile map interaction, the problem of mapping, and analyse how people solve it with 2D and 3D mobile maps. We focus on users’ strategies, not only in matching features or cues but how the physical and the digital environment is interacted with in order to find those cues in the first place. To conclude the paper, we propose a working model of how people achieve mapping. Fig. 1. The mapping problem: The user must mentally construct a between points in physical and virtual spaces The problem of mapping Location-based services utilizing maps assume, ipso facto, a one-to-one mapping between virtual and physical worlds. From a psychological perspective, the fundamental cognitive challenge to their user is to construct an adequate mental representation of the one-to-one mapping between digital and physical spaces (see Figure 1). This is called the problem of mapping. Satisfactory mapping is fundamental to human intentional action with mobile maps in the sense that its solution presumed by and underlies almost all map-related tasks: finding a location, recognizing and identifying a location, investigating a location, exploring an area, understanding a spatial relationship between locations, finding a route between locations etc. Furthermore, it underlies egocentric spatial orientation and updating, “the mechanisms involved in locating positions in space relative to oneself after a given spatial transformation”, and can thus be regarded as cognitively primary to tasks in location-based services. Previous research Previous research has been very technologyor, say, maporiented. The general problem has not been identified and tackled by its own. For example, Rakkolainen and Vainio [1] studied wayfinding processes in their mobile information system. Test task was to find a site from the database, view the route there and finally actually walk there. The results indicated that users preferred to use a combined map rather than to use only the 2D map or the photo-realistic model alone. Users more likely recognised their own position and the landmarks from the photo-realistic model than from the 2D map. Vainio and Kotala [2] concluded that the 3D model illustrates motion and changing the location more clearly that 2D map alone. Bessa et al. [3] showed their participants photographs of certain places and asked to identify the locations and name the key features for identification. After this users were brought to the same physical location (from different direction than the photo) and asked to identify the same spot and specify the number of objects that they used for identification. They discovered that only the overall geometry and a few key features were required and that the features were not necessarily those most salient to human visual system. They also claimed that the time taken to orientate oneself