| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊工程學研究所 === 102 === As the technology innovates and expands, the mobility of human beings increases and the uses of a mobile navigation system are growing in its popularity. Cartographic interfaces are often used in these systems as an alternative to traditional paper maps with higher interactivity. In this thesis, I argue that existing mobile cartographic interface solutions are not best suited to guide a pedestrian from A to B. The main reasons for it are the dynamic context of use for mobile users and limitations of the mobile devices. The aim of this thesis is to design, implement, and evaluate a more usable mobile interface for pedestrian navigation. The term geolocation apps will be used for the mobile applications that use cartographic interfaces in this thesis. In order to develop a geolocation app with high usability, I followed the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to learn from the user and design for the user. I first performed a thorough overview of existing geolocation apps to understand the problems and currently available solutions. To further understand the user requirements and define the design goals, semi-structured interviews and user shadowing observations were conducted during the requirement analysis phase of this research. The selected participants in these two experiments represent travelers using geolocation apps to an unfamiliar city. From the results of these experiments, I gained a deeper understanding of the geospatial information required by users and causes of their disorientation. Based on the findings from requirement analysis, a prototype interface, TopoNav, was then implemented on iOS and it runs on a standard Apple iPhone. In order to evaluate the usability of TopoNav, a field-based observation was conducted with representative participants of travelers to an unfamiliar city. Google Maps were also tested for comparison purpose. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of TopoNav, the participants were asked to perform four navigation and orientation tasks during the test. Audio record and thinking aloud were the main research methods used. The results show that TopoNav has better usability than Google Maps in the given context of use. In addition to this, valuable feedbacks from the participants were collected to make further improvement of TopoNav in future.
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