Abstract
Abstract. This paper presents Human-Computer Interaction design guidelines for interactive wayfinding assistance systems which provide on-line route instructions. These design suggestions are based on a corpus of human-to-human, on-line, landmark-based route instructions in German language which were gathered by means of an in-situ study involving pairs of participants. Based on the description of this collection, which is made publicly available, an in-depth analysis of the corpus is presented: This analysis reveals the importance of establishing Common Ground through existential-presentative constructions which have, up until now, not been taken into account in presenting route instructions to users of pedestrian navigation systems. These syntactical constructs provide the empirical ground for two important design suggestions: Systems should, first, ask for explicit feedback whether a salient object is recognised by users before referring to this object in a route instruction. Second, a mode of negotiating Common Ground once it was lost should be implemented, which can be initiated by the user. The results reveal the importance of the state-tracking capabilities of wayfinding assistance systems.
Highlights
Despite the complexity of the task, wayfinding, i.e. deliberately getting from a starting point to a destination in a familiar or unfamiliar environment [see e.g. 1, 2], is successfully achieved by humans on an everyday basis
5.1 Important Definitions The analysis is based on three important linguistic concepts, namely Common Ground (CG) Content, Topic Construction and Existential-presentative constructions (EPCs)
As landmarks are entities and references to these are known to be used in human-to-human route instructions, EPCs are an obvious mean of CG management [46] and will be used as a basis for our analysis
Summary
Despite the complexity of the task, wayfinding, i.e. deliberately getting from a starting point to a destination in a familiar or unfamiliar environment [see e.g. 1, 2], is successfully achieved by humans on an everyday basis. Research in systems providing assistance in solving this task and decreasing its complexity has raised considerable interest [see e.g. 3]. Among these efforts, route instructions per se, their calculation and their presentation have seen much interest in research on wayfinding assistance systems (see Section 2). With respect to the design of wayfinding assistance systems, human-to-human, real-world route instructions are worthwhile to study from a linguistics point of view [see 5] for two reasons: First, the linguistic interactions can be mimicked by these systems in order to increase the likeliness of successful wayfinding. We lack sufficient knowledge about how elements of discourse relate to wayfinding success [see 6].
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