Visual Task Solution Strategies in Public Transport Maps

Paper pdf-Version

Gaze plots for the Paris metro map for a single participant: (a) Clearly visible route with short saccades. (b) Different route from that in (a) is chosen with longer saccades.

Public transport maps are used as visual aid for travellers to support the route finding task from a start to a destination. Although those maps are designed in a user-friendly manner by applying effective layouts, color codings, as well as intuitive symbolic representations it is unclear which perceptual, readability, and understandability problems the human user has when looking at those maps. In a preliminary eye tracking experiment with 8 participants, we asked people to find a way between highlighted start and destination stations on different maps. Based on a visual scanpath analysis, we discovered a set of different visual task solution strategies that will build the foundation for hypotheses to evaluate in a final user study.