Less is More – Route Planners
Posted Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 by James Rosenberg
James Rosenberg
James enjoys getting involved in projects and collaborating with clients to get the best results. He has carried out loads of user testing, using all sorts of materials to make them the best possible. He likes beer and playing golf (at the same time whenever that’s possible!). Email James, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
Maneesh Agrawala and Chris Stolte at Stanford University wrote a paper describing a potentially more usable map. The sequence of three pictures below demonstrates a typical computer generated route planner on the left, a hand written set of directions in the middle and the output of their route planning software, ‘LineDrive’, on the right.
As you can see, the map on the left is difficult to understand, cluttered and in many ways unusable. Simply watching how users do things without a computer can be of great benefit to designing computer interfaces.
And of course, as always, less is more.
About the author
James enjoys getting involved in projects and collaborating with clients to get the best results. He has carried out loads of user testing, using all sorts of materials to make them the best possible. He likes beer and playing golf (at the same time whenever that’s possible!). Email James, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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LineDrive reminds me of C17th “strip maps” that helped people travelling by coach and horses know where the next pub was.
Strip maps are also used for overviews of motorways in my atlas.