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Nina Webster and Steve Draper, University of Glasgow
People's Navigation Problems on Our Campus
People's Navigation Problems on Our Campus
There will be a GIST
seminar at 4pm on Thur. 4 June in the conference room, 17 Lilybank Gardens
(how to get there)
on "People's Navigation Problems on Our Campus".
Speakers: Nina Webster and Steve Draper
Abstract
This talk will be based on Nina's final year project, in which she
investigated problems people have in "using" (i.e. finding their way around)
this university's campus. She attempted 11 different studies, of which 8 made
it into her dissertation, but only a few can be described in this talk.
One feature of this work is its use of many small studies of different kinds
to get a good overall grasp of the problem: an approach useful in many kinds
of evaluation where the problems are not known in advance.
Subproblems examined include how people find buildings, how they find rooms
within buildings, and the redesign of the campus map's indices to support
users' tasks better. While some problems have been created by university
policies such as giving buildings meaningless names (so users must translate
"Chemistry department" to "Joseph Black building" to "B4" in order to use the
map), others are fundamental to the way people seem to conceptualise urban
spaces in terms of landmarks, regions, edges, etc. (entities identified by
Lynch in his "The image of the city").