The utilization of publicly available map types by non-experts – a choice experiment

Assessing the fitness of map types for certain task types is a long-standing cartographic research challenge. One way to contribute to this research challenge is to study which map types people choose to use when they are given various tasks, thus documenting the current public preferences. While people’s choices may be expressions of bias to some degree, these may also be indications of appropriateness of these map types for the studied tasks. In this vein, we have conducted an online user study (n= 141, 74% male, 26% female) in which participants were given five map types to choose from while they executed 11 non-expert “everyday” map use tasks. In this paper, we report our findings on participant’s choices of map types associated with task types. Furthermore, we analyzed the map types in a categorized manner for 3D vs. non-3D, cartographic vs. photorealistic, and aerial perspective vs. first-person perspective and contrasted each with the task types