Die openSenseMap bietet live Daten zu verschiedensten Umweltphänomenen, Jedoch ist es zur Zeit schwierig diese Daten erkunden. Ziel dieser Bachelor Arbeit wäre es neue Möglichkeiten zu schaffen, die Daten interaktiv darzustellen. Interessant wären zum Beispiel live Interpolationen über Feinstaubwerte oder die Temperaturentwicklung in Innenstädten im Hochsommer. Um diese Daten einem möglichst grossem Publikum zur Verfügung zu stellen, soll in dieser Bachelorarbeit untersucht werden, welche Möglichkeiten hier neuste Webtechnologien bieten. Verschiedene Visualisierungen sollen generiert werden und mit einer Nutzerstudie evaluiert werden.  

Learning Analytics ist eine Methode zur Erfassung, Messung, Analyse und Visualisierung von Daten über Lernende und ihren Kontext, die es ermöglicht den Lernfortschritt zu verstehen und Lernpfade zu optimieren, um dem Lernenden aber auch Lehrenden Feedback zum Lernprozess zu geben. Learning Analytics lässt sich besonders gut in digitale Lernplattformen einbinden. Blockly für die senseBox ermöglicht es Anfängern in die Mikrocontrollerprogrammierung einzusteigen.Trotzdem können Fehler im "Code" entstehen, wodurch das Programm nicht kompilierbar ist. 

Ziel der Arbeit ist die Entwicklung einer Learning Analytics Komponente, die dem Nutzer Feedback zum selbst programmierten Code gibt, Hinweise bei Fehlern und Lernfortschritte trackt.

Mit WebGIS NRW (webgis.nrw) existiert ein prototypisches WebGIS für den Bildungskontext, das auf modernen open Source Technoligien basiert (MapBox GL). Ziel der Arbeit ist die Weiterentwicklung des WebGIS nach User Centered Design Prinzipien und eine Evaluation der Usability.

When people draw sketch maps, they generalise information compared to the ground-truth information they perceived in the world. For example:

- many buildings belonging to university campus are drawn as a single polygon labelled "campus",

- a complex roundabout is drawn as a few crossing lines,

- 10 side streets from the main road are drawn as a few random lines, only to indicate that "some side streets" are there. 

This is a challenge for analysing sketch maps because this information is not wrong, yet a computer system for automated analysis would interpret it as such.

In the paper linked below we presented a classification of generalisation types in sketch maps, and many other examples. We also also have a working software prototype for analysing generalisation in sketch maps.

This thesis topic can be concerned with the software implementation of different algorithms for detecting generalised spatial information (e.g., in a comparison between a sketch map and OpenStreetMap data), and/or with theoretical studies of how people generalise information.

Examples of potential research questions:

- What affects the level of specific generalisations, e.g., when people perform stronger vs weaker forms of "amalgamation" generalisation?

- What are common ways to schematise complex spatial structures (e.g., roundabout), and how people do it spontaneously in drawings?

- How to detect and algoirthmically differentiate the >lack of some object< (e.g., a missing streets in an area) from their generalisation?

Despite substantial progress in digital technologies, and the increasing adoption of digital technologies for the collection of land-related data (see e.g. ArcGIS Field Maps, Qfield, or MAST), information related to land (e.g. citizen-to-city-council-communication, purchase transaction, inheritance transactions) is still managed manually. This is a missed opportunity and this thesis will use a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore possible futures of digital land rights management. RtD is a “type of research practice focused on improving the world by making new things that disrupt, complicate or transform the current state of the world” (Zimmerman and Forlizzi 2014). Tasks include:  

Requirements specification: derive requirements for applications for map-based land rights data management through scenario formulation (for an example of scenario-based study, see Degbelo and Somaskantharajan, 2020)

Implementation: develop a mobile app (frontend + backend) that implements some of the requirements. The mobile app may be a simple responsive web app or use a framework for mobile app development

Evaluation: validation of design decisions of the mobile app through interviews with domain experts and/or additional users. 

References

Degbelo, A. and Somaskantharajan, S. (2020) ‘Speech-based interaction for map editing on mobile devices: a scenario-based study’, in Alt, F., Schneegass, S., and Hornecker, E. (eds) Mensch und Computer 2020. Magdeburg, Germany: ACM, pp. 343–347. doi: 10.1145/3404983.3409996.

Zimmerman, J. and Forlizzi, J. (2014) ‘Research through design in HCI’, in Olson, J. S. and Kellogg, W. A. (eds) Ways of Knowing in HCI. New York, New York, USA: Springer New York, pp. 167–189. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_8.

Links

ArcGIS Field Maps: https://www.esri.com/de-de/arcgis/products/arcgis-field-maps/overview 

Qfield: https://qfield.org/ 

MAST: https://www.land-links.org/tool-resource/mast-technology-2/

Annotations of visualizations is a useful task during exploratory data analysis. As illustrated in [1,2], users may want to record trends, clusters, distributions or outliers found on components of a geovisualization during a data analysis session. A key challenge here is that of summarizing the annotations produced by various users during their exploration activities. This thesis will look into computational and/or graphical means of producing these summaries. Tasks include: 

Prototyping: design of a web-based or mobile prototype to record annotations of web maps graphically.

Data collection: here graphical annotation of web-maps will be generated. These annotations could be synthetic or real, depending on the scope of the thesis. 

Summarization: this design, implementation and evaluation of summary approaches. 

References

[1] Heer, J., Viégas, F. B. and Wattenberg, M. (2009) ‘Voyagers and voyeurs: supporting asynchronous collaborative visualization’, Communications of the ACM, 52(1), pp. 87–97. doi: 10.1145/1435417.1435439.

[2] Lai, P.-C. and Degbelo, A. (2021) ‘A comparative study of typing and speech for map metadata creation’, in Partsinevelos, P., Kyriakidis, P., and Kavouras, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 24th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science (AGILE 2021), pp. 1–12. doi: 10.5194/agile-giss-2-7-2021.

OriGami is a GeoGame fostering spatial literacy: The player has to solve several wayfinding tasks to various locations and answer questions at these locations. At the current state, it is a single-player game.

As part of this thesis, you would have to extend the concept of OriGami for a multi-player version, where players can compete or work together to solve tasks. After the conceptual development, you should implement a user management + implement the collaborative games and evaluate your game.

More information on OriGami can be found on our project website http://enable-project.eu/origami/.

Requirements:

You should have some experience in android programming and interest in location-based games.

Learning Analytics is a method to collect, measure, analyze and visualize data about learners and their context. It enables the understaning of the learning process and allows an adaption of learning pathes based on the collected data. It also gives feedback to the learner and teacher about the learning process.

In their seminal paper Wiener et al. (2009) defined the taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks. The taxonomy is based on the type of knowledge possessed by the navigator. However, it did not differentiate between any subcategories of the "Path Following" task. In other words, according to the taxonomy, there is no difference between (a) knowing your route without knowing anything about the wider surrounding enviornment, and (b) knowing your route AND knowing about the wider surrounding enviornment.

Schwering et al. (2017) argued that there are substantial differences between such two tasks and that they deserve to be distinguished in an updated taxonomy.

The goal of this thesis will be to test the hypothesis that following the same route, with the same knowledge about the route, is a cognitively different task depending on whether the navigator has, or does not have, survey knowledge about the broader envionment.

Wiener, J. M., Büchner, S. J., & Hölscher, C. (2009). Taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks: A knowledge-based approach. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 9(2), 152–165.

Schwering, A., Krukar, J., Li, R., Anacta, V. J., & Fuest, S. (2017). Wayfinding Through Orientation. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 17(4), 273–303. doi:10.1080/13875868.2017.1322597

Metaphors reflect how people think about user interfaces, and people naturally produce spatial metaphors when talking about user interfaces (see e.g. Matlock et al, 2014). Though previous work has acknowledged their values in HCI, there is still a lack of techniques to formally describe metaphors and tools to facilitate their analysis. This thesis will use existing taxonomies of image schemas (e.g. Mandler and Canovas, 2014) to annotate people’s actions during map interaction and build a tool that help make sense of the metaphors they use. Tasks include:

Data preparation: users will be given map interaction tasks, and asked to describe their actions during the task completion (e.g. think aloud) or after completion (e.g. interview)

Encoding:  encode the actions described by users as a sequence of image schemas (e.g. AB-CD-EF-GH-EF-CD)

Analysis tool implementation: the tool will use text mining techniques and visualization techniques to help answer questions related to metaphors of map interaction. Example questions:

• Which metaphors are used more often during the completion of map interaction tasks? [descriptive analysis]
• Which metaphors occur more often together [co-occurrence analysis]?
• How similar are metaphors used by two given users for a given task? [string similarity analysis]
• What are regularities of metaphor use across users during a study? [sequence analysis]
• Can a sequence of metaphors be used to predict a given interaction task? [predictive analysis]

References

Hurtienne, J. and Israel, J.H., 2007, February. Image schemas and their metaphorical extensions: intuitive patterns for tangible interaction. In Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction (pp. 127-134).

Matlock, T., Castro, S. C., Fleming, M., Gann, T. M. and Maglio, P. P. (2014) ‘Spatial metaphors of web use’, Spatial Cognition & Computation, 14(4), pp. 306–320. doi: 10.1080/13875868.2014.945587.

Mandler, J.M. and Cánovas, C.P., 2014. On defining image schemas. Language and Cognition, 6(4), pp.510-532.

Despite substantial progress in digital technologies, and the increasing adoption of digital technologies for the collection of land-related data (see e.g. ArcGIS Field Maps, Qfield, or MAST), information related to land (e.g. citizen-to-city-council-communication, purchase transaction, inheritance transactions) is still managed manually. This is a missed opportunity and this thesis will use a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore possible futures of digital land rights management. RtD is a “type of research practice focused on improving the world by making new things that disrupt, complicate or transform the current state of the world” (Zimmerman and Forlizzi 2014). Tasks include:  

Requirements specification: derive requirements for applications for map-based land rights data management through scenario formulation (for an example of scenario-based study, see Degbelo and Somaskantharajan, 2020)

Implementation: develop a mobile app (frontend + backend) that implements some of the requirements. The mobile app may be a simple responsive web app or use a framework for mobile app development

Evaluation: validation of design decisions of the mobile app through interviews with domain experts and/or additional users. 

References

Degbelo, A. and Somaskantharajan, S. (2020) ‘Speech-based interaction for map editing on mobile devices: a scenario-based study’, in Alt, F., Schneegass, S., and Hornecker, E. (eds) Mensch und Computer 2020. Magdeburg, Germany: ACM, pp. 343–347. doi: 10.1145/3404983.3409996.

Zimmerman, J. and Forlizzi, J. (2014) ‘Research through design in HCI’, in Olson, J. S. and Kellogg, W. A. (eds) Ways of Knowing in HCI. New York, New York, USA: Springer New York, pp. 167–189. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_8.

Links

ArcGIS Field Maps: https://www.esri.com/de-de/arcgis/products/arcgis-field-maps/overview 

Qfield: https://qfield.org/ 

MAST: https://www.land-links.org/tool-resource/mast-technology-2/

Current search engines return results in almost a fraction of a second to any query submitted by users. This often comes with the drawback of users navigating through a number of irrelevant results. This thesis will explore the impact of adding query disambiguation steps of overall user satisfaction during search, and investigate the extent to which users are willing to trade response time with quality of results. Tasks envisioned include:

1. Data preparation

2. Development of a prototypical search engine, which (a) asks users which place they mean when homonyms are available (e.g. Berlin, USA vs Berlin, Germany), (b) offer disambiguation functionalities before the display of results using e.g. the Geonames API 

3. Development of a prototypical search engine, which simulates the functionalities of the current state of the art offered by search engines

The evaluation will involve A/B testing, and gathering of participants’ feedback during a user study.

The modifiable areal unit (MAUP, see [1]) problem is a well-known issue to geographers and GI scientists working with spatially aggregated data. In essence, the MAUP states that the conclusions drawn about a phenomenon are strongly dependent upon the spatial granularity of the analysis. The same principle holds for the temporal granularity of analyses and has been called the modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP, see [2]). Given an increasing amount of visualizations of geographical data on the Web (e.g. to communicate about the outcomes of political elections and the spread of diseases such as Covid-19), there is a need for effective ways to educate citizens about the effects of the MAUP and MTUP. This thesis aims to explore strategies to make the general public aware of MAUP and MTUP issues. Tasks of this work include:

Task 1: data collection (at different levels of spatial detail) about a topic. One of the aims of this work is to inform the public opinion about progress regarding the SDG 4.3. The Sustainable Development Goal 4.3 strives to “ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university”. Thus, we envision here data collection about gender equality in education in the Netherlands and/or Germany (e.g. statistics about how many females/males started a given subject of study & how many graduated). The data will be analyzed at different levels, e.g. city district, city, country state, and country.

Task 2: Develop and evaluate strategies to 1) maximize user experience and engagement of participants with the topic of the SDG 4.3, and 2) raise awareness to the general public about the effects of the MAUP and MTUP on the interpretation of the data. The prototype should be optimized for use on mobile devices, as we assume that citizens primarily inform themselves through mobile devices. Knowledge of technologies for mobile app development (e.g. Apache Cordova, React Native, or others) is expected.

Task 3: A user study to assess the impact of the different strategies devised on the user experience, and engagement with the topic. The study may also assess the impact of personality types on the preferences of users.

This work will contribute i) curated spatio-temporal data about SDG 4.3; ii) a mobile prototype that communicates a snapshot of the progress made on SDG 4.3; and iii) insight about visualization/interaction strategies that are most convenient to users while interacting with this important societal topic. The lessons learned in this work can inform about how to best communicate SDG data and help citizens engage with it more broadly.

[1] Fogarty, E. A. (2010) ‘Modifiable areal unit problem’, in Warf, B. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Geography. SAGE Publications, Inc., pp. 1935–1937. doi: 10.4135/9781412939591.n780.

[2] Coltekin, A., De Sabbata, S., Willi, C., Vontobel, I., Pfister, S., Kuhn, M. and Lacayo-Emery, M. (2011) ‘The modifiable temporal unit problem’, in ICC2011 Workshop. doi: 10.5167/uzh-54263.

Geovisualizations are increasingly available and finding them manually is becoming increasingly challenging. There is thus a need for techniques to automate their discovery. This work will build and evaluate a prototype for the generation of knowledge graphs on top of geovisualizations. Tasks include:

Dataset preparation: visualizations from existing galleries will be extracted manually, or through a crawler.

Knowledge harvesting: approaches to generate knowledge graphs out of these visualizations will be discussed and implemented.

Evaluation: the approaches to knowledge graph generation will be tested via a user study. The baseline here will be keywords search.

Readings

Hu, Y., Janowicz, K., Prasad, S. and Gao, S. (2015) ‘Enabling semantic search and knowledge discovery for ArcGIS online: A linked-data-driven approach’, in Bacao, F., Santos, M. Y., and Painho, M. (eds) AGILE 2015 - Geographic Information Science as an Enabler of Smarter Cities and Communities.

Weikum, G., Hoffart, J. and Suchanek, F. (2019) ‘Knowledge harvesting: achievements and challenges’, in Steffen, B. and Woeginger, G. (eds) Computing and Software Science: State of the Art and Perspectives, pp. 217–235. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-91908-9_13.

Schematic maps are maps that intentionally distort and misrepresent geometries in order to simplify maps. Oftentimes, schematic maps give a better overview of the environment, because they focus only on important aspects. The displays of mobile devices offer only limited space. This thesis topic aims at the development of an algorithm to schematize maps automatically for mobile devices.

Schematization refers to misrepresentations of shape and size of spatial objects and distortions of distance and direction relations among them. The research starts from findings by Latecki and Lakämper, who developed the discrete curve evolution, an algorithm to schematize topographic maps. Barkowski et al. applied this algorithm to map schematization.

References:

Latecki, L.J. and R. Lakämper (2000). Shape similarity measure based on correspondence of visual parts. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) 22(10): 1185-1190.

Barkowsky, T., L.J. Latecki, and K.-F. Richter (2000). Schematizing maps: Simplification of geographic shape by discrete curve evolution. Spatial cognition II: Integrating abstract theories, empirical studies, formal methods and practical applications. C. Freksa, et al., Springer: 41–53.

Powerful methods in an area called "dynamic geometry" provide a rapid way of solving a wide range of spatial reasoning problems. For example, as a user manipulates some shapes (circles, lines, points) in an "intelligent" sketch, the sketch automatically updates itself to maintain certain spatial constraints (e.g. lines being tangent to circles, lines being parallel to each other, and so on).

In medicine these shapes could represent different types of cells that have been automatically recognised from images of a tissue section, and the task could be to determine whether the cells are cancerous (histopathology). In geographic information systems these shapes could represent streets, buildings, and landmarks recognised from satellite images or directly from a hand-drawn sketch.

In this thesis project you will be:

• extending the spatial language of dynamic geometry to work with common-sense qualitative spatial relations (near, left of, inside, etc.)
• integrating dynamic geometry into a knowledge representation (artificial intelligence) framework

You will then use this enhanced technology for a range of exciting tasks, such as:

• improving computer-based image recognition by automatically correcting errors based on knowledge about objects in the domain
• providing new ways of interacting with complex data using "intelligent" sketches

Through this research project you will develop skills and experience in the application of methods in artificial intelligence (AI). You will be introduced to the necessary tools and existing projects to build on. No prior experience with methods in AI is necessary (you will be given considerable support in this area).
 

"Learning by induction" is the ability to take a number of observations or examples and discover rules that account for the observations - it's the ability to generalise from examples.

Being able to generalise spatial patterns from observations is essential for artificial intelligence systems to perform a variety of tasks in a flexible and robust way. We don't want to tell the computer system exactly how to solve every specific problem it will encounter. Instead, we want to give it some examples and have the system use common sense and background knowledge to figure out ways of solving new problems that have a similar structure.

In this thesis project you will be:

(a) integrating a new powerful "common sense" spatial reasoning method called Enhanced Geometric Constraint Solving within a more general artificial intelligence framework for inductive spatial learning;

(b) evaluating the system in a range of exciting applications in geographic information science, architectural design, cognitive psychology (analogical reasoning), and medicine (histopathology).

Through this project you will develop skills and experience in the application of methods in artificial intelligence (AI). You will be introduced to the necessary tools and existing projects to build on. No prior experience with methods in AI is necessary (you will be given considerable support in this area).
 

User experience of geospatial products is increasingly studied (see e.g. [1, 2]), but models  describing the results of these studies for further reuse are still lacking. The aim of this thesis is to provide an approach to systematically build such models. Building these models is key to realize intelligent geovisualizations [3]. Tasks include: 

Task1: Development of a prototype to collect data about the user experience of different types of map-based applications. This prototype can be mobile or not, and could investigate, for instance, the impact of color palettes, mean spacing between elements (e.g. menu items), size of the elements (e.g. icons, labels), visual hierarchy and the cross-device validity of the findings.

Task2: Conduct user studies to collect data about the user experience of a geospatial application under different conditions.

Task3: Model-fitting (i.e. find the mathematical function that describes the model most adequately). 

References

[1] Degbelo, A. and Somaskantharajan, S. (2020) ‘Speech-based interaction for map editing on mobile devices: a scenario-based study’, in Alt, F., Schneegass, S., and Hornecker, E. (eds) Mensch und Computer 2020. Magdeburg, Germany: ACM, pp. 343–347. doi: 10.1145/3404983.3409996.

[2] Einfeldt, L. and Degbelo, A. (2021) ‘User interface factors of mobile UX: A study with an incident reporting application’, in Paljic, A., Peck, T., Braz, J., and Bouatouch, K. (eds) Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 2: HUCAPP. Online: SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, pp. 245–254. doi: 10.5220/0010325302450254.

[3] Degbelo, A. and Kray, C. (2018) ‘Intelligent geovisualizations for open government data (vision paper)’, in Banaei-Kashani, F., Hoel, E. G., Güting, R. H., Tamassia, R., and Xiong, L. (eds) 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. Seattle, Washington, USA: ACM Press, pp. 77–80. doi: 10.1145/3274895.3274940.

Reading

Miniukovich, A. and Marchese, M. (2020) ‘Relationship between visual complexity and aesthetics of webpages’, in Bernhaupt, R. et al. (eds) Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA: ACM, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1145/3313831.3376602.

Landmarks are commonly used in human daily communication of wayfinding instructions. Research has suggested the potential of increasing efficiency by using landmarks in wayfinding instructions. Further studies investigated the use of landmarks in wayfinding instructions in terms of their location: Global, local at decision point, and local along a route. While the locations of landmarks have been introduced, their specific effects are not clear yet. This study aims to test wayfinding instructions with landmarks at specific locations: landmarks at decision point or landmarks along route. This study includes two major objectives as follows:

1. Constructing wayfinding instructions with landmarks at specific locations in visual or verbal forms;
2. Testing the effect of each type of instructions on aspects of wayfinding such as orientation, accuracy, and configuration.

This research contributes to a more comprehensive study on landmarks with respect to their locations on route

Es gibt verschiedene Möglichkeiten Menschen mit Karten zu Navigieren. Die meisten unterstützen entweder die bestmögliche Routenführung oder das Aneignen von räumlichen Umgebungsinformationen (Münzer, Zimmer, & Baus, 2012).

In der vorliegenden Bachelorarbeit wurde auf Basis der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit von Schmid, Richter, & Peters (2010) eine neuartige Möglichkeit der Navigation, die Route Aware Map, im Hinblick auf die Vermittlung von räumlichen Wissen untersucht. In dieser wird durch Berechnung des Weges und Anzeigen der Karte in der Vogelperspektive mit relevanten Umgebungsinformationen versucht, zum einen eine gute Routenführung zu ermöglichen und gleichzeitig die räumliche Wissensakquise zu fördern.

Citizen science and crowdsourced data have been getting the attention of researchers and citizens alike in recent times. A successful citizen science platform that wants to engage its users in a long term participation needs to meet above average standards in usability and functionality for both power and novice users. In this thesis the citizen science platform OpenSenseMap, a generic platform for environmental sensor data, will be improved based on feedback that was gathered in its rst year of use and general principles of web design. A usability test will give indications on how well its users like to interact with it and what still needs to be done.

An increasing number of geographical searches is performed from mobile devices, out in the world. Many of them consider places located at relatively close proximity, within the spatial context of the searcher. In such situations, presenting the user with the entire map of his/her surrounding is rarely justified and presents an unjustified cognitive processing challenge. In addition, the sole action of looking at a map (not to mention its processing) can be considered superfluous e.g. when the aim of the user is merely to reach the nearest open pub as soon as possible. And yet, in mobile-based navigation, the only substantial progress in relation to desktop-based (or traditional paper-based) maps is the presence of a ‘You-Are-Here’ indicator and a turn-by-turn set of instructions. For all situations when the user does not need (or want) to learn the map of the environment, the currently available navigational systems demand too much attention - they force us to look at the screen and mentally process its content. This project will explore the possibility of developing a ‘calm’ navigational system. Using Weiser and Brown’s definition, ‘calm’ technology is one that allows the user to stay in control of the situation but does not demand constant attention. Students can explore the possibilities arising with wearable technologies (augmented reality glass, vibrating watch, audio-systems, etc.) to answer the question: How can a navigational system guide us from A to B without even being noticed by its user.

Bachelor students will develop a proof of concept / prototype.

Master students will develop a proof of concept and conduct user studies.

Quick Reading: only one great paper written in 1997(!) and still relevant today.

Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1997). The coming age of calm technology. In Beyond calculation (pp. 75–85). Springer.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, am Beispiel von Hamburg mit einer Usability-Studie Probleme aufzudecken, die Nutzer auch mit bereits veröentlichten Anwendungen noch haben. Dabei werden die mobileWebseite und die Applikation untersucht und eventuelle Probleme in der Bedienung sowie markante Unterschiede zwischen beiden Anwendungen ermittelt, ohne dabei den Anspruch einer statistischen Auswertung zu haben.

Zunächst wird genauer auf die Thematiken der mobilen Fahrplananwendungen und dem Usability-Testing eingegangen und das Beispiel Hamburg kurz vorgestellt. Anschließend wird die Herangehensweise an einen Usability-Test geschildert und dessen Durchführung und Ergebnisse zusammengefasst. Abschließend wird ein kurzes Fazit aus den Ergebnissen des Tests gezogen. Das erste Kapitel erklärt die Usability und das Usability-Testing, führt in die Thematik mobiler Fahrplananwendungen bei Verkehrsbetrieben ein und stellt das hier untersuchte Beispiel des Hamburger Verkehrsverbundes vor. Im zweiten Kapitel werden die Erkenntnisse genutzt, um einen Usability-Tests zu entwickeln, durchzuführen und die Ergebnisse zu beschreiben. Abschließend gibt es noch eine Deutung dieser Ergebnisse.

When giving directions, we often use gestures to communicate changes in orientation. We rotate our bodies, wave our hands, and shift our heads. Seeing these gestures helps the person receiving the instruction to keep his/her orientation in the newly constructed mental map of the environment. They are intuitively given and intuitively understood. Many, even across distinct cultures. Navigational systems could potentially build on these gestures to represent changes in direction, or point to an important landmark lying along the route.

Bachelor students will run user studies to pick an interesting gesture potentially helpful during navigation. They will propose a modification to the existing navigational systems which utilises the gesture to support the navigation.

Master students will first run user studies to explore and classify the variety of relevant gestures used during direction-giving. Based on this classification, students will develop a concept of a navigational system which utilises some of those gestures.

Some reading:

Hirtle, Stephen C. "The use of maps, images and “gestures” for navigation." Spatial Cognition II. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2000. 31-40.

Along with the increasing proliferation and power of mobile devices, mobile maps (e.g. in pedestrian navigation systems) become both feasible and popular [Allen, 2000]. In contrast to the navigation mode in car navigation systems, pedestrians prefer route instructions based on salient objects [Kluge and Asche, 2012]. Although it is easy for users to get guided to a location, research suggests that the effects are negative. Moreover, users become device-focused and develop a reduced understanding of the environment [Munzer et al., 2006]. Accordingly, users might get lost in cases of inaccurate instructions or failures of the system as they only focus on the given route and turning-point instructions. Consequently, studies suggest that wayfinding and learning of the environment can be influenced through visual presentation modes with mobile applications [Munzer et al., 2012]. One type of information that are mostly not considered in mobile navigation solutions are landmarks. However, it has shown that landmarks are an important supportive element in wayfinding tasks [Golledge, 1999]. One of the key strengths of a map is that it can visualize features and their spatial relationships of a large area. Though, the limited space of mobile devices leads to a visualization of only a discrete view of an area. As consequence, the acquisition of spatial knowledge is impacted
with respect to accuracy and response time [Dillemuth, 2009]. Since the space of
the display is limited, landmarks are often outside of the displayed area. Accordingly, they have to be mapped on-screen to overcome this limitation. Research has already shown that displaying distant landmarks on-screen holds positive effects on supporting persons acquisition of directional knowledge that benefits spatial orientation [Li et al., 2014]. For the reason that the chosen visualization does not convey information about distance from the user’s position to the distant object a better visualization has to be provided. Research already provides several approaches to display distant objects on small displays (e.g. [Baudisch and Rosenholtz, 2003], [Gustafson et al., 2008], [Bertel et al., 2014]). However, given approaches are mainly focused on guiding a user to a distant
location. Therefore, this thesis will aim at adapting common approaches of research to display off-screen landmarks in order to investigate in what extent spatial orientation is supported while navigating through traffic.

Mobile devices have become increasingly popular in supporting people to find their ways in our daily lives. Providing navigation support is not only guiding a wayfinder to reach one or multiple destinations. More importantly, it should support the wayfinder’s spatial orientation to improve the wayfinder’s awareness of the environment. Research has suggested approaches to enhance a person’s spatial orientation while using maps on mobile devices by visualizing distant off-screen landmarks with landmark-indicating icons at the edge of the screen to indicate directions (LI, KORDA, RADTKE, SCHWERING 2014). An amendment to this design is to incorporate distance into the design and placement of landmark-indicating icons. Research explored various methods to visualize distant off-screen locations which are focusing of indicating distance and direction such as Halo (circles at the edge), Wedge (triangles at the edge) and Stretched (arrows at the edge) (BERTEL, KOHLBERG, LUTTER, SPENSBERGER 2014; BOLL, HENZE, 2011), but these methods are distinguishing the locations from each other just by using different colors. In context of categorized points of interest, it is useful to visualize different categories of points at the same time in different colors (such as automatic teller machines in a one and restaurants in another color). But global landmarks are unique and specifiable from each other and thus, it is not useful to create a category containing multiple global landmarks. Hence, using only different colors in combination with Halo, Wedge, and Stretched will not help users to identify distant off-screen landmarks. A new approach of visualizing identifiable landmark-indicating icons enhanced with distance information to those off-screen landmarks is subject of investigation.