GPS Navigation Interface Usability Studies And Experiments

With the development of auto industry and auto demand increases, cars have become an indispensable means of transportation in the life. At the same time, the rapid development of information products to make the car loaded with a large number of electronic products. So the driver’s limited mental resources have received the serious challenge, and that cause traffic accidents. Among them, the rate of traffic accidents caused by navigator is over 30%. So how to improve the utilization rate of navigator has become an important research subject.Navigation is the commonly used electronic equipment inside the car. It can help the driver programming path and giving directions. Navigation interface is the main way of interaction between the driver and navigator, and its quality affects the driver’s cognitive process directly. So improving the usability of navigation interface can improve the utilization rate of navigator, so as to reduce the number of traffic accidents. The navigation interface is studied in this paper, so as to improve the usability of navigation interface.First, this paper studies the vehicle navigation system, situational awareness and usability research, and summarizes that the usability of navigation interface mainly has two problems. The one is that the pilot workload is too heavy, and another one is that the choice of the navigation information is not reasonable, but this paper considers that the root cause is lack of situational awareness. Higher situational awareness can be greatly reduces the workload of the driver.Secondly, based on the usability research for landmark information and comparison for the navigation screen found that landmark information and static images of real are favorable for the formation of situational awareness. The navigation interface improved design is proposed in this paper, and it was evaluated through the investigation and study and comparative analysis. The result is improved more interface usability. So improvement scheme is feasible.Finally, this paper designed a contrast experiment validated for improvement program. Through contrast analysis of completion time of the experiment, scanning frequency and scanning time, the degree of mental load, complete navigation interface recognition difficulty, it is concluded that the improved navigation interface is more superior in all these aspects. It is shows that the usability level of improved navigation interface is higher, and improvement scheme is feasible.