Long gone are the days of paper maps, or printed, sometimes inaccurate directions, or sacrificing your dignity to ask a gas station attendant for help. It's easier than ever to figure out how to get where you want to go, and even to make adjustments if you get lost. The GPS's embeddedness into our car culture is such that you can now step into your car, have the freedom to drive to places you've never been without any idea about which route to take, and completely, absolutely trust your GPS device to lead the way.
The TomTom GPS Navigation System.
CHALLENGES
1. MOUNTING THE GPS
One of the challenges of designing any GPS system is being able to securely and safely place it on the dashboard without trepidation that it will fall off mid-drive. Other devices require awkwardly putting force on them while pushing down a lever, which results in user frustration when it doesn’t stick. The TomTom's grip dial, on the other hand, requires little effort and is very straightforward to use; however, in practice, the suction is not very strong. When driving with the TomTom in my car, the GPS fell off the dashboard more than once after I'd placed it and checked that it was fastened properly.
This is a critical, physical issue that compromises the driver's safety and their trust in the device, since the driver will immediately turn their attention to the falling object and trying to reattach it rather than focusing on the road.
2. RELIANCE ON PHYSICAL INPUT
The TomTom, like most GPS systems, relies completely on a touch-screen interface to accomplish user tasks. This translates well for initial selection of a route, and makes looking at maps fun and intuitive. However, the touch-screen becomes cumbersome and takes away the user’s focus when actually driving by forcing them to take their right hand (which for most people is their dominant hand) off the wheel. Danger Zone!
3. RELIANCE ON VISUAL FEEDBACK
The act of moving your head to look at something is called the vestibulo-ocular reflex, which defines how a user responds to the TomTom's visual feedback. Overt reliance on this type of eye movement is not only a hazard, but a mismatch between user expectations and design considerations.
This may not necessarily be limited to the TomTom model. When I was first learning to drive, I had a similar Garmin model. I was driving in an unfamiliar area at night, and was having a hard time deciphering where I needed to turn because the GPS displayed too much information. I might as well have pulled over and used a paper map. I expected the GPS to make directions easy to follow without me having to turn my head, stare at a diagram, and then evaluate the diagram as quickly as possible. Isn't that the one of the problems with maps that the touch-screen GPS is supposed to solve?
REDESIGN IDEAS
ossible solutions might incorporate the use of verbal inputs and outputs, as well as taking advantage of different types of eye movements.
1. HANDS-FREE NAVIGATION
To allow the device to be more hands-free, one suggested improvement would be to include user voice commands. Users could speak keywords such as “Go Home” to plan a route home from their current location, or speak addresses and points of interests. Of course, this would cost a lot more to implement and would make navigation systems more expensive for the consumer. But, speech recognition is not brand new technology and is rapidly improving, so adding this feature is entirely feasible.
2. DRIVER-FRIENDLY VOICE FEEDBACK
Maps make the user more informationally aware and thus more susceptible to needing frequent verbal updates from the GPS navigation system. Often the real user of the GPS is the person in the passenger seat, since they might relay the graphical information to the driver that the driver can't interpret fast enough on their own. But what happens when there is no one in the passenger seat?
To make the GPS more driver-friendly, it should speak street and exit names, or even prominent landmarks; just saying "Turn Right" isn't always helpful when there are many possibly choices that are close together. "At the next light, turn Right at Green Street", is instantly more helpful and more natural.
Screen displays message overlay when an instruction is about to occur and returns to map view after a few seconds.
3. REFLEXIVE VISUAL FEEDBACK
When announcing that a direction is about to occur, these announcements should have a corresponding, readable directive on screen to assure the driver they’re going the right way. This directive should emphasize saccadic eye movements rather than the vestibulo-ocular reflex described earlier, by reducing the information load on the user. Saccades are rapid, voluntary, and essentially reflexive eye movements; drivers tend to look at the screen briefly while driving for confirmation of directions they just heard. Even including a street view would be a great improvement, because the user could recognize the image as the road they're currently on without much effort. Together, these two ideas could help reduce the number of missed turns and exits.
When announcing that a direction is about to occur, these announcements should have a corresponding, readable directive on screen to assure the driver they’re going the right way. This directive should emphasize saccadic eye movements rather than the vestibulo-ocular reflex described earlier, by reducing the information load on the user. Saccades are rapid, voluntary, and essentially reflexive eye movements; drivers tend to look at the screen briefly while driving for confirmation of directions they just heard. Even including a street view would be a great improvement, because the user could recognize the image as the road they're currently on without much effort. Together, these two ideas could help reduce the number of missed turns and exits.
** Many GPS navigation systems now incorporate various aspects of these features, but as they are difficult to implement, are not quite commonplace yet. Hopefully this will change soon, for the sake of all drivers out there!
