Agile Design Exploration: Examining User Interface Concepts for Future Navigation Systems

The design space for navigation systems is much bigger than what is seen in commercial products today. Innovation in navigation systems currently reaching the market often focuses on “eyecandy” that adds little to the usability of the systems. There is, however, a large opportunity to improve input, output, functionality and adaptivity of navigation systems. We report how an agile design exploration process was applied to examine this design space and develop system probes for use scenarios in pedestrian navigation, small-craft sailing and on/off road car navigation. We discuss the user feedback and its implications for future interface concepts for navigation systems. The market for so called personal navigation devices (PNDs) has experienced a rapid expansion in recent years. Until 2001 the automotive navigation market had been dominated by embedded navigation systems. Since then portable PNDs have taken over a large percentage of the market. While marketed as personal devices that are “portable” and suitable for “hand-held” use, the current generation of PNDs is designed specifically for in-car use on the road network. Efforts to address the specific requirements of pedestrians, cyclists, bikers or off-road navigation have been very limited so far. While there is a lot of variety in the details of the interaction mechanisms and presentation styles used in current PNDs most systems use a common design, employing a touch screen (and sometimes speech recognition) for input and a 2D map or 2.5D perspective view combined with audio output to convey the guidance information. With the increasing competition in the PND market developers are currently looking at a variety of innovations to distinguish their products from the competition. Typical examples include the use of wide-screen displays, the use of textured 3D models in the visualization or the integration with on-line services to provide “intelligent” routing. While many of these new features are certainly effective from a marketing perspective they seem to add little to the usability of the systems, as experience reports of users show. A large opportunity exists to advance the usability of future navigation systems by improving input, output and functionality and adapting them better to users and the task at hand. A usercentred process is required to develop innovations in these domains that are of actual benefit to the user. In the work reported here we have applied an agile design process to explore the design space for navigation systems without limiting the process to established standard hardware platforms. Selected system probes were developed and tested to validate key assumptions and inform future design decisions.