Study on In-Vehicle Navigation System Usage and Driving Behavior Patterns

As part of the In-Car Computing Research led at the Mixed Reality Lab Nick Forbes performed a study on in-vehicle navigation system usage and driving behavior patterns. This works has some outcomes related to my current ethno study of taxi drivers’ use of navigation system:

Types of navigation system usage
Passive navigation system usage: the system mainly provides a sense of orientation and situation awareness.

Active navigation system usage: can be defined as occasions where the destination is entered. The system may provide routing advice, turn by turn guidance and traffic information.

Navigation mode and familiarity with environment
Previous research has shown that although navigation system users frequently use their systems in an active manner when travelling in unfamiliar environments, there is a clear tendency to use the system actively less frequently when travelling in familiar environments (where drivers have the benefit of local knowledge).

Navigation mode and familiarity with the system
The results also suggest a tendency for novice navigation system users to utilise full system functionality more often than experts while travelling in unfamiliar environments.

Maps and complacency
Only 15% of participants thought that routing instructions generated by their navigation systems were always completely reliable.

A follow-up longitudinal diary-based study should provide more qualitative and contextualized data.

via the Map Room

Less scientific, but still revealing to the study of in-vehicule navigation system usage, GPS Review reports on the large gaps in expectations of GPS devices from people shopping for GPS devices (a source of the social-technical gap in location-aware computing):

What I was most amazed about was how quickly their expectations of the device went from pure amazement of the moving map and being bewildered by the fact that the GPS has side streets to disappointment that not every POI was in the database and road changes just completed a few months before were not yet in the database.

Relation to my thesis: This work first provides some key references in psychology, hci and traffic and transportation I was definitively lacking. Then, previous works in that field seem to mainly rely on quantitative survey-based data. I see a niche to come up with in sitiu ethnographic observations that could bring other perspective to the domains of system usage, familiarity with the environment and familiarity wit the system. Moreover, the recalling mechanism might be easier for the user while being in the context of usage.