Augmenting Audio Messages with Visual Directions in Mobile Guides: an Evaluation of Three Approaches

Supporting users’ navigation is a fundamental feature of mobile guides. This paper presents an experimental evaluation comparing three different ways of providing navigation guidance by combining visual and audio directions during guided city tours. The three considered solutions differ in the way audio directions are augmented with visual directions: a traditional map-based solution, a combination of a map and photographs of the area, a combination of large arrows and photographs. The results of our evaluation show that when the map is combined with photographs that clearly indicate the direction to the user or when the map is replaced by a combination of directional arrows and photographs, users’ performance is significantly better. Moreover, the combination of map and photographs was highly preferred by users.