The Effects of Cognitive Abilities and Geographic Orientation Ability on Navigation in Verbal and Graphical Interfaces

Users performance when seeking for information in two information spaces of different design was correlated with their cognitive abilities, and their geographic orientation ability. One of the information spaces had a visuo-graphical interface, and the other a verbal interface. The results showed that correlations with spatial abilities and with geographical abilities were found only for the visuo-spatial system. This suggests that so-called information navigation perhaps is less similar to navigation in geographic space than has previously been thought, and as a consequence that designers perhaps should consider developing more verbally based help tools or interface designs to support users with less strong spatial abilities.