From Wayfinding Model to Future Context-based Adaptation of HCI in Urban Mobility for Pedestrians with Active Navigation Needs

ABSTRACT

Everyday travel in expanding cities is becoming increasingly complicated. Going to the doctor, to work, to the cinema, or simply discovering the districts of a city requires knowledge of the city and navigation skills. The future challenge is more than just providing correct guidance to make navigation easier; it is more about delivering the relevant information when it is needed and prioritizing the continuous development of the users’ navigation skills. This article aims to present a novel model based on existing literature about the cognitive wayfinding process by proposing a state diagram for interactive system analysis and design. This diagram may help to illustrate different states of the wayfinding task and how navigation aid systems for pedestrians can consider this context awareness to create an adaptive behavior considering the spatial knowledge of the user. A first study, focusing on one state of the wayfinding process: Path Following state, and its results are presented illustrating one example of different studies that can be designed considering our wayfinding model. At the end of this article, we highlight a set of design guidelines that may lead to the next generation of navigation aid systems based on the wayfinding model.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the PRIMOH pole, the Valmobile Project, ELSAT fundings and all people who collaborate on this work from both teams, in psychology from the PSITEC Laboratory of the University of Lille and in Human-Computer Interaction from the LAMIH of the Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France. Special thanks go to Viktoria Kovacs for her support and her precious feedback. The authors also thank warmly the reviewers for their numerous constructive remarks.

Notes

1. Blinded Navigation: the way of navigating the environment focusing on the received guidance from different assistance tools and losing the awareness of the surroundings and thus the lack of the ability to remember the path.

2. Wayfinding consists of a planned trip to a destination that requires the establishment of a route (Montello, 2005).

3. The hippocampus is a specialized region in the brain to navigate the spatial environment (Maguire et al., 2000).

4. Beacon guidance: navigation aid method, different from turn-by-turn instructions, aims to inform the user about the direction of the destination (Albrecht et al., 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aymen Lakehal

Aymen Lakehal is a PhD student in Computer Science (Human-Computer Interaction) at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France. His main research concerns navigation assistance and improving spatial knowledge acquisition.

Sophie Lepreux

Sophie Lepreux obtained her PhD in 2005. She is an assistant professor in Computer Science (Human-Computer Interaction) at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, in the LAMIH-CNRS laboratory. Her research concerns methods and models for HCI design, context-aware adaptation with focus on platform (tabletop, SmartGlasses) and user with disabilities.

Laurie Letalle

Laurie Letalle obtained her PhD in Psychology in 2017 at the University of Lille. Her research concerns self-regulation, spatial navigation and intellectual disability.

Christophe Kolski

Christophe Kolski obtained his PhD in 1989. He is a professor of computer science at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, Valenciennes (France). His researches concern human–computer interaction, software engineering for interactive systems, adaptive user interface, context-aware systems, and tangible and distributed interaction.