An Empirical Study on Interfaces for Presenting Large Sets of Point Features in Mobile Maps.

This paper presents an empirical study assessing the usability and utility of different interfaces for visualizing large sets of point features in mobile maps. We focus on interfaces that present only a subset of all features and provide interaction functionalities for browsing through all of the information. We compare an established zoom-and-pan interface against three recently proposed interfaces that do not require a change of map scale or section. Each of the novel interfaces implements one additional, specialized interaction functionality for presenting all information without the need to zoom or pan. As a first step towards user-centred design, we investigate how well the specialized interactions are adopted by users. Given a visual search task, we show that participants performed significantly fewer zooming and panning operations using the novel interfaces than when using the zoom-and-pan interface. Further, we observe advantages in terms of search accuracy and the extent of the visible map area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]