Maps in the Mind: Improving our spatial awareness in the age of navigation apps

User Experience Design, Mobile App

This project is a by-product of finding fascination in the details of the seemingly ordinary things in day to day life and their implications that often go unnoticed or simply taken for granted. To me, maps are one of those.

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Introduction

In recent years, navigation apps have risen to such a degree of omnipresence, that we rarely go about a day without consulting them. With the richest of geospatial data moulded with simplest of user experiences paradigms, these apps have made finding our way around in cities easier than it was ever before. However, our constant dependence on them evokes a rather uncertain future for our own abilities to navigate urban environments.

Through this project, I attempt to probe the relationship between this technology and the people who use it. Instead of proposing a singular final solution to a particular problem, my approach has been exploratory. I investigated a range of methods and exercises that help in harnessing our spatial knowledge and eventually translated them into a few simple interventions for the existing tech so that they can be just a little more human-centric.

SECTIONS OVERVIEW

Establishing Foundations 2. Getting Hands-on 3. A Way Forward

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SECTION 1: Establishing foundations

Designing a navigation experience that integrates the users existing knowledge of the city, and supports learning of the environment.

Understanding how we navigate

There are two key strategies that we employ when we navigate our environments:

Direction based strategy : Also known as sequence based strategy, this involves the ability to remember and repeat a sequence of steps, like 'take a left at the gas station.. take a right after the bridge' and so on.

Spatial mapping strategy: This involves the understanding of how the various parts of the city are distributed and organised with respect to each other.

Understanding how navigations apps affect our spatial learning

Taking a closer look at the interface design and interaction models of navigation applications, a few elements are to be noticed:

The Keyhole Effect

While recent smartphones have larger screens, there is still a limitation to the amount of information that can be displayed, without the risk of losing readability. Most navigation apps use zoomed-in, detail views that show only a small portion of the user’s immediate environment, in city terms, we can call it approximates to two blocks ahead of the user and two blocks behind. This affordance is detrimental towards building an overall survey map of the city.

" …with Google Maps you cannot see the whole space - you are like a blinkered horse. "

- Mahesh Bharpilania, 52. A tourist visiting Copenhagen

Blue dot dependency
The integration of the blue dot indicating the users real time location has been by far one of the most important elements of a digital map. But it is also a double edged sword.

The resulting behaviour out of this is that the blue dot for the users location and the blue line indicating the users route becomes the only parameter that the user needs to be aware of. “As long as my arrow on the blue line, I am fine”. This dependence — for determining one’s location and for ensuring they are on the route, removes any need for the user to observe and map their environment.

"We did try using a paper map, but the challenge is to find where on the map you presently are…the blue dot is the most important thing in Google Maps"

- Jake, 27, exchange student at CBS

How do we perceive space

Navigation is a very subjective experience and I was curious to learn how people perceive urban geographies around them. So, I invited 16 of my classmates for a short workshop to see how each of them expressed their experience of a space. Our class had recently spent two weeks in Porto for an industry project, and using that experience as our common ground I conducted the workshop. My participants were asked to draw their mental map from our hostel to a snack bar that was a favourite amongst practically every one.

If you had to give someone the walking directions from our hostel to Taberna St. Antonio, what would you sketch out?

↑ Workshop Prompt

Key finding 1 : Attributing Landmarks

Across everyone’s mental maps, one common attribute was the indication of landmarks throughout the route. Either the square, the empanada shop, or the stairs to the inner town. This made it clear that the landmarks were key in expressing how people perceived space and interpreted the relationship between different places.

Key finding 2 : Allocentric versus Egocentric views

Another observation in the sketches was the orientation that one of the participants had drawn the map in. While most of the sketches were rendered with the river at the bottom (accurate to the map's north oriented rendering), a few sketches used a different orientation.

While perplexing at first, I realised that these were drawn from an ego centric perspective; where the geography was oriented about the hostel and the originating from the direction in which they got out the entrance.

Areas of focus

The relative locations of landmarks and the person’s frame of reference play a key role in shaping one’s understanding of the geography.

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SECTION 2

Getting Hands-on

EXERCISE 1: FUZZY MAP

Encouraging a consistent frame of reference with subtle micro interactions

How often have we noticed others or ourselves rotating the map to make it align with the direction of travel? While doing so make’s it easier on our cognition to think of directions aligned with our perspective (egocentric), doing so does not contribute towards our mental map of the space around us.

What if the map was visible only when the user is facing one consistent direction?

This prototype reads the compass direction of the phone, and hides or reveals the map depending on which way it's facing. In order to view the map, the user has to align the phone towards north to view the map. On turning away, the map progressively fades out. The interaction ensures that a constant frame of reference is used every time the user refers a map. This concept looks to embed a subtle nudge within the map application to encourage appropriate usage.

EXERCISE 2: I-SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE

Building configurational relationships through playfulness

“I spy a yellow train, above the table!”. The children’s game i-spy is a great activity to help kid’s recognise and express the space and spatial relationships around them.

Can the principles from a kids spatial awareness game be adopted to enable learning of one’s larger geography?

The prototype i-spy map a minimal map of the city with a set of prompts that take into account spatial relationships. An example prompt could be, “ I-spy the church to the west of the central station” or “I-spy the harbour close to the mermaid”. The participant would have then spot the location using this cues, and place a marker on the map.

EXERCISE 3: LANDMARK COMPASS

Using landmarks as active references for orientation

When we navigate in an urban environment, we rarely refer to cardinal directions (North, South, East, and West) but rather refer to areas, districts or landmarks.

Landmark compass is a prototype that indicates landmarks instead of cardinal directions. The goal of this prototype was to understand if a users can use references to landmarks as a means to navigate between places in a city. Tests were designed to study if landmark based navigation can be successful. Read more about the details of the tests here ↗︎

EXERCISE 4: POINT TO THE LANDMARK

Establishing directional relationships between places to form the larger picture of the space

Point to the landmark is a concept where the user is asked to guess the direction of certain landmarks around them. This prototype uses the metaphor of a bow and arrow. The user long taps on the screen to receive a new target destination, and then releases the finger after pointing the phone in the direction of that destination. On release, the exact direction of the destination is indicated.

ON TESTING PROTOTYPES

Throughout the process of this project, users were brought in for testing different aspects of the exploration. Some of the tests were aimed at verifying higher level concepts such as 'how do landmarks play a role in navigation and can they be used as a reference to get around in a city', while some others were focussed on the smaller micro details such as visuals feedback and interactions.

The methods for every test varied based on the nature of the goal. Tests that were aimed at understanding how landmarks are used as reference points, a few elaborate navigation workshops lasting 70-80 minutes were carried out in 3 sq. km area of Copenhagen Centrum.

Another test was carried out remotely with a respondent who was visiting Moscow. Since the respondent was relatively new to the city, this context was especially beneficial to verify the efficacy of one landmark awareness.

Screenshot_2019-09-18 maps in the mind — Keyur Jain.jpg

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SECTION 3

A Way forward

To illustrate how some of these concepts could come to life, we can split the learning opportunities into two classes:

A. Active in-navigation learning: When a person is attempting to find his/her route from A to B. For example, the person driving a car.

B. Passive learning: When a person has no active intention of navigating to a place. For example, a person riding a bus or sitting on the back seat of a car.

A video sketch was created to illustrate the how some of the exercises and prototypes created thus far can be integrated into everyday interactions with existing navigation apps. Three different scenarios were chosen, each of which either fall under active navigation or passive learning, and appropriate interactions were illustrated. The scenarios and respective interactions are showcased via the video sketch below:

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for having an amazing bunch of friends, mentors and colleagues who helped me over the course of this project.

Manu Dixit
Neil Churcher
Pierluigi Dalla Rossa
Rasagy Sharma
Shruti Ramiah
Simon Herzog
Tobias Toft
Troels Andersen

& the entire IDP' 17 crew <3

Andrew Nip
Aram Armstrong
Blair Johnsrude
Dayna Conway
Engin Ayaz
Harsha Vardhan
Henrik Thomsen
Jesper Vestergaard
Joshua Walton

Sharing 'Maps in the Mind' with visitors at the CIID '17 Exhibition (Picture by Pierluigi Dalla Rossa) — Sharing 'Maps in the Mind' with visitors at the CIID '17 Exhibition (*Picture by Pierluigi Dalla Rossa)*

This project was carried out as my thesis for the Interaction Design Programme at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

TIME FRAME

Sept 2017 to December 2017 (10 weeks total)

TOOLS

Sketch, Framer Studio, Mapbox Studio