Mobile electronic aids for indoor wayfinding

This thesis aims to explore the strategies people use to navigate an unfamiliar indoor environment. Many studies of wayfinding have been done in the past, but most pertain to outdoor environments and few studies take place solely indoors. This thesis also sought to develop a portable wayfinding aid that could downloaded to a visitor’s portable device and be carried around during their visit to a new indoor environment. Two experiments were run, the second expanding on the first. Subjects were given an iPad™ device loaded with a custom-made map program and asked to find a series of locations in the building, while a researcher followed them taking notes on subjects’ think-aloud data and asking questions of the subject between tasks. In both studies, subjects who used a more globally-oriented strategy performed better than subjects using a surroundings-based strategy. The use of the program made for the device also revealed a number of guidelines for the creation of effective indoor wayfinding aids