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The territory is the map: designing navigational aids

Published: 07 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

It has been shown that people encounter difficulties in using representations and devices designed to assist navigating unfamiliar terrain. Literature review and self-reported visual and textual data from field experiments are presented. This suggests usability may be limited by assumptions about landmarks implicit in designing representations. Firstly, memorable landmarks are emphasized but route following in situ requires recognizable landmarks. Secondly, little emphasis is placed on differences between landmarks contributing to higher-level concepts related to wayfinding and those directly provoking actions in the environment. Studies analyse landmarks in SMS during collaborative wayfinding to an unfamiliar rendezvous and in images to communicate routes in unfamiliar terrain. Findings illustrate usability benefits for navigation aids. This includes helping users to align a landmark's illustration to their individual perspective in the environment. It also includes identifying landmark salience for shared use by people navigating in dispersed groups to dynamically-negotiated rendezvous.

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Bidwell N. J. & Axup J The Territory is the Map: Exploring the Use of Landmarks in Situ to Inform Mobile Guide Design To appear: Xth IFPC Conference for Human Computer Interaction INTERACT05 Rome (2005)]]

Cited By

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  • (2015)The missing linkJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2344166:12(2704-2707)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
  • (2009)Exploring the use of landmarks for mobile navigation support in natural environmentsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/1613858.1613875(1-10)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2009
  • (2008)Aspects of personal navigation with collaborative user feedbackProceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges10.1145/1463160.1463180(182-191)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008
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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      CHINZ '05: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand chapter's international conference on Computer-human interaction: making CHI natural
      July 2005
      103 pages
      ISBN:1595930361
      DOI:10.1145/1073943
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      • The University of Auckland

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 07 July 2005

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2015)The missing linkJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2344166:12(2704-2707)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
      • (2009)Exploring the use of landmarks for mobile navigation support in natural environmentsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/1613858.1613875(1-10)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2009
      • (2008)Aspects of personal navigation with collaborative user feedbackProceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges10.1145/1463160.1463180(182-191)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008
      • (2007)So James, can you find your way any faster?Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology10.1145/1378063.1378174(645-652)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2007
      • (2007)Users Are Doing It For Themselves: Pedestrian Navigation With User Generated ContentThe 2007 International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (NGMAST 2007)10.1109/NGMAST.2007.4343406(91-99)Online publication date: Sep-2007
      • (2006)Emplacing experienceProceedings of the 2006 international conference on Game research and development10.5555/1234341.1234358(96-103)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2006
      • (2006)Learning from insects?Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand chapter's international conference on Computer-human interaction: design centered HCI10.1145/1152760.1152772(91-97)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2006
      • (2006)Berrypicking in the real world: A wayfinding perspective on information behavior researchProceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/meet.1450420124142:1Online publication date: 18-Oct-2006

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