It's also about timing! When do pedestrians want to receive navigation instructions

Abstract

In the design of pedestrian navigation systems, research has focused on what the route instruction should be, how to presented it but not when to present it to the user. This work aims to shed light on the potential of adapting timing to the wayfinder’s preferences. Variables on personal, behavioral and environmental level were derived from data collected during an outdoor wayfinding study (N = 52). Participants followed navigation instructions to reach a destination and could request the instructions at any point in time and as often as they needed. Exploratory analysis was applied to determine driving variables in the observed behavioral processes by using survival analysis to predict when the user would like to listen to the instruction and generalized estimating equations to model population-average effects determining whether a user would like to hear a navigation instruction more than once. The results of this work suggest relevance of variables of all levels for the prediction of route instructions timing. Sense of direction, familiarity with the environment, personal characteristics such as neuroticism and openness, spatial strategies, age and landcover-related variablesyield significance in our models and hint at the importance of personalizationand adaption to variability of the environment in pedestrian navigation systems.