Usability in Location-Based Services: Context and Mobile Map Navigation

The paper discusses usability and communicative capability of mobile multimodal systems. It reports on the evaluation of one particular interactive multimodal route navigation system and discusses the challenges encountered in this task. The main questions concerned the user’s preference of one input mode over the other (speech vs. tactile/graphics input), usefulness of the system in completing the task (route navigation), and user satisfaction (willingness to use the system in the future). The user’s expectations and real experience of the system were analysed by comparing the users’ assessments before and after the system use. Conclusions concerning system design are drawn and discussed from the perspective of the system’s communicative capability, based on the view of the computer as an interactive agent.