Not simply a circle: directional You-Are-Here symbol design improves the usability of indoor layout maps

ABSTRACT

The indoor layout map contains information about the architectural interior space. Users often utilize the You-Are-Here (YAH) symbol on maps to firstly determine their current location and orientation to find the direction of a target location. Circle symbols often seen only indicate a user’s location, making it difficult to complete the orientation process. Based on alignment effect theory, we modified symbols by adding current orientation information. We conducted a target orientation experiment using eye-tracking technology to examine whether symbol modification positively affected users’ orientating performance in virtual subway station scenes on desktop. The results indicated that participants in the modified symbol group achieved a higher accuracy within a shorter time in orientation tasks. We also found that modified symbols significantly reduced users’ visual reliance on environmental information. Another experiment, in order to further investigate the role of YAH symbols in maps of different complexity, indicated that our modified symbol achieved obvious improvements regardless of map complexity. These findings revealed that the modified symbols indeed improved the convenience of orientation and the overall usability of indoor layout maps.

KEYWORDS:

• You-Are-Here (YAH) map
• indoor layout map
• 3D map
• eye-tracking
• map symbol

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the participants in the experiment for their contributions to the study. Comments from reviewers were appreciated, which helped improve the article’s quality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

As a result of the protection of the research participants’ privacy and subsequent ethical problems, the original eye-tracking data cannot be publicly shared. Despite this, we have prepared a tidy data table encoded from original data, with one participant per line. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RLTZOS.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2023.2189166.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant No. 42230103 and No. 42242102).