User experiences with activity-based navigation on mobile devices
A. J. Bernheim Brush, Amy K. Karlson, JAMES R. SCOTT, Raman Sarin, Andy Jacobs, Barry Bond, Oscar Murillo, Galen C. Hunt, Mike Sinclair, Kerry Hammil, Steven Levi · 2010
We introduce activity-based navigation, which uses human activities derived from sensor data to help people navigate, in particular to retrace a "trail" previously taken by that person or another person. Such trails may include step counts, walking up/down stairs or taking elevators, compass directions, and photos taken along a user's path, in addition to absolute positioning (GPS and maps) when available. To explore the user experience of activity-based navigation, we built Greenfield, a mobile device interface for finding a car. We conducted a ten participant user study comparing users' ability to find cars across three different presentations of activity-based information as well as verbal instructions. Our results show that activity-based navigation can be used for car finding and suggest its promise more generally for supporting navigation tasks. We present lessons for future activity-based navigation interfaces, and motivate further work in this space, particularly in the area of robust activity inference.