January 2008 CAMPBELL and LYONS: Wayfinding in the Urban UTSG Southampton Environment WAYFINDING IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT Ms Mhairi Campbell Research Fellow University of the West of England Professor Glenn Lyons Director Centre for Transport and Society University of the West of England Abstract Having difficulty finding a destination can be costly to individuals and organisations. Individuals have to endure feelings of frustration, confusion and even fear, while time is wasted and appointments are missed. This paper examines, based upon a series of in-depth interviews, how well a selection of technology-mediated wayfinding services are meeting travellers’ requirements. Firstly a sample of PDF documents providing directions (found using Google) is compared in terms of information format and content to the requirements of individuals in assisting their comprehension of directions. The use of and attitudes towards a further five forms of technology- mediated wayfinding assistance are considered. What happens when travellers experience a problem finding an unfamiliar destination is explored, discovering distinct behaviours towards finding destinations: ‘always find it’; ‘persevere’; and ‘occasionally abandon’. Following this, occasions when the traveller abandons the unfamiliar journey are examined, with the emergence of three categories of wayfinding problems: complex layouts; simultaneous travelling and wayfinding; and comprehension of directions. Only by understanding these issues, together with the needs and desires of people wayfinding in the urban environment, will it be possible to ensure that current and future information provided for wayfinding is both useful, i.e. the information is what is needed by the traveller, and usable, i.e. the traveller is easily able to make use of the information. Introduction Having difficulty finding a destination can be costly to individuals and organisations. Individuals have to endure feelings of frustration, confusion and even fear (Lynch, 1990), while time is wasted and appointments are missed. Organisations can lose business or clients, as well as incurring the costs involved in staff time spent finding destinations themselves or directing others. The majority of research into wayfinding has used experimental techniques in relation to cognitive functions within the fields of psychology and geography. There remains a knowledge gap concerning the impact different forms of assistance can have on unfamiliar wayfinding and how the traveller copes with finding unfamiliar destinations. A growing number of forms of technology-based wayfinding assistance exist and analysis of their development (see later) is evolving. However, there is a paucity of research into how useful and used such assistance is in relation to people’s needs and experience of wayfinding in practice. This paper aims to make a contribution to better understanding the place of technology-mediated assistance in meeting people’s needs and concerns when undertaking unfamiliar journeys. It begins by focusing upon a relatively widely available and accessible form of assistance – bespoke directions to a given destination made available as an electronic document. Examination of the nature of assistance provided in a sample of such documents is considered alongside the preferences for wayfinding assistance expressed by individuals participating in in-depth interviews. Drawing upon this interview data, the paper goes on to consider attitudes towards a variety of other forms of technology-mediated assistance. Wayfinding problems, which motivate the need for provision of assistance and take-up of assistance to resolve them, are then considered in terms of a number of issues: occasions when people abandon unfamiliar journeys; concerns over wasted time; and categories of wayfinding problems. The next section of the paper offers a brief examination of the literature to set a context for addressing the elements above. This paper is produced and circulated privately and its inclusion in the conference does not constitute publication. 2A1.1 CAMPBELL and LYONS: Wayfinding in the Urban January 2008 Environment Southampton UTSG Background Human wayfinding research examines: “how people find their ways in the physical world, what they need to find it, how they communicate directional information, and how people’s verbal and visual abilities influence wayfinding.” (Raubal et al. 1997). Three types of wayfinding are defined by (Allen, 1999): ‘commute’, ‘explore’ and ‘quest’. ‘Commute’ involves following a familiar route from a known origin to known destination with low levels of uncertainty for the traveller. Generally there is little conscious effort required. The ‘explore’ form of wayfinding aims to discover new information about an unfamiliar environment. This involves a familiar start and destination, often the same place, with the aim of finding new places and new paths between these new places and places already known to the traveller. This wayfinding involves greater levels of uncertainty for the traveller, as to whether the information they gather from the exploration will be of any use. Unlike commute wayfinding which generally uses automatic memory and low levels of effort, explore wayfinding involves conscious cognitive processing. Finally ‘quest’ wayfinding involves uncertainty for the traveller. The traveller is proceeding to a specific destination which is unfamiliar to them and which they may not have previously visited. ‘Quest’ wayfinding requires high-level cognitive abilities, greater than those required for explore wayfinding (Allen, 1999). The focus upon unfamiliar travel within this current paper falls within quest wayfinding as defined by Allen (1999). A substantial amount of research has been conducted on wayfinding, especially within the fields of psychology and human geography. Much is known about the cognitive functions of how people tend to find their way (see Kitchin, 1994; Løvås, 1998; Timpf, 2002; and Tversky, 2003), and how this is a hierarchical process (see Hartley et al. 2003 and Maguire et al. 2003). When people are deciding which route to take, as pedestrians and when driving, several factors are taken into consideration: the shortest path; the path with the least changes in direction; and taking the longest part of the path first judged by line of sight, (Golledge, 1993; Dalton, 2003). These factors are generally of greater importance than the amount of time taken to travel the route. People generally attempt to minimise the length of time to create strategies for wayfinding routes (Golledge, 1993). However, much of this work has involved experimental conditions, with less research focussing on real-life practicalities of wayfinding, especially within complex urban environments. While people can often enjoy the fun and satisfaction of wayfinding (Passini, 1984), this would usually be in the context of leisure time. It is unlikely that many people would consider finding their way from a city centre to a hospital, or meeting with their bank manager, a leisure activity. Satisfaction will also depend upon the pressures associated with the wayfinding task such as timely arrival at a destination and how effectively, within such constraints, the individual is able to wayfind. A study by Devlin and Bernstein (1997) involving an on-screen wayfinding exercise found that lower reported frustration levels correlated with higher confidence. The level of frustration also correlated positively with the error score, suggesting a relationship between lower frustration and fewer errors. When people lose their way, they become angry, hostile and indignant (Abu- Ghazzeh, 1996). This is corroborated by the finding that when using public buildings, if visitors know where they are going, they experience less stress (Evans et al. 2002), and research which reported that wayfinding ease was found to positively enhance the experiences of museum visitors (Talbot et al. 1993). A further link between feelings of stress and problems wayfinding is given by (Malinowski and Gillespie, 2001) who found that the task of orienteering with a map and compass was predicted by anxiety, the greater the anxiety level, the lower the orienteering performance. They argue that if even 1% of the tourists visiting large cities get lost, that is potentially a huge number of confused anxious tourists (Malinowski and Gillespie, 2001). With the ongoing emergence of methods and services to assist travellers find their intended destinations, research is emerging concerning technologically-mediated assistance for wayfinding, such as that by Kray et al (2003) who discuss the different ways information can be provided on PDAs and suggest guidelines for deciding which format is best for a given situation. This research found that among experienced map users, when using mobile wayfinding devices, an aerial view (the view usually shown by traditional 2D maps) was generally preferred over the eye-level view. This notion of technologically-mediated assistance replicating traditional means of assistance is also touched upon by Zipf and Hunolstein (2003) who found that since most tourists are content with paper maps and tourist guides, any mobile forms of assistance aimed at tourists are required 2A1.2 January 2008 CAMPBELL and LYONS: Wayfinding in the Urban UTSG Southampton Environment to match the range of information provide by the existing paper medium to entice tourists to use mobile guides. The bounds of technological possibility (enabled by suitable data feeds)