Small Details

This research, conducted in collaboration with Bonnie Mackay, considered how personal and environmental navigation aids are used together, and how this impacts the design of digital services for pedestrian navigation.

We designed an experimental simulation that involved pedestrian navigation through urban buildings. After preliminary exploration of the navigational support (e.g. signage, kiosks, vistas, personnel) in a range of urban buildings, three were chosen (a typical shopping mall, a boutique/tourist mall, and a convention centre). All three were connected by an indoor pedestrian walkway (pedway) system.

Participant pairs shared a single mobile phone on which route information was presented. Experimental variables were the route's presentation format and the method for retrieving the route. The study shed light on how personal technologies are shared during group navigation, on how the environment (including the embedded navigational support) influence patterns of collaboration and technology use, and how designing for direct integration between the device and embedded tools (like kiosks) can benefit wayfinding [1,3,6,7,8].

Contemporary work looked at modifications of the Marked-up Maps prototype application to support shared use of augmented maps. The maps can be digitally annotated, and annotations are immediately visible to all clients using the map. To support divide-and-conquer strategies when searching map regions, the regions that have been selected by others on the map can be visualized prior to performing a spatial query or selection operation [9,10].

Need to Know

This project was a collaboration with Intel Research (Seattle). In it we considered how variations in the context of use impact the kind of information people need or want regarding the location of others.

We conducted a diary study to build a sense of when people want or need to know details about another's location in their daily lives. From this we designed a number of scenarios in which location information is needed, and for each we mocked up five interfaces providing compatible information. We then personalized each scenario for all of our 50 participants to elicit more realistic feedback. Participants were presented with variations of each scenario (in which some contextual attribute was varied, such as the activity of the person you are requesting location information about), asked to rank the five interface options and comment on their #1 choice.

Results show a remarkable influence of even seemingly innocuous contextual details, highlighting the complexity of the design space in which mobile social services exist. Notable trends include a concern for what is 'appropriate' rather than to follow dogmatic standards of individual privacy, and a preference for familiar technologies when the information need was deemed 'urgent' [12].

Sharing views across devices

While having access to digital information can be beneficial in many instances, it is difficult for multiple people to view information simultaneously on small devices. This project was a collaboration of many members of the EDGE lab. Together, we explored how the ability to share annotations across personal devices might benefit coordination and collaboration while navigating a city.

The City Chase

This study involved three pairs of participants using handheld computers in a city-wide adventure scavenger hunt called the City Chase. This was an organized event in which teams were required to navigate a city, solve clues, find race pit-stops and perform unusual tasks at these stops. The objective of the race was to finish these challenges before any other team. Our three research teams were equipped with handheld devices, cell phones, paper and electronics maps, and bus schedules to help them achieve this goal. A "command center" was setup in the lab where race participants could call to request online resources and other help.

Our study was plagued by a number of methodological challenges (pertaining to mobile data capture and a lack of environmental control). The study employed a form of experience prototyping: the participants were lab members, familiar with the design (and blemishes) of the prototypes they were using. Because they were engaged in a very real contest, bias toward the technology was overcome -- so much so that the experience was marked by an almost total neglect of the prototype in favour of more traditional paper maps and phone assistance. [2,4,5,11]