Usability Evaluation And Analysis Of Schematic Representation For Road Maps

Schematic maps have clear representation due to the simplification of shapes by ignoring unnecessary information,and has been widely used in public transportation maps.Current research work on the representation of schematic maps mainly focus on subway network.For subway map,the information requirements mainly on the the subway line to be taken and the intersection station,while for road maps,there is still a lack of usability evaluation to check whether the simplified representation of schematic maps can provide enough support to the spatial cognition.Hence,this study aims to conduct a usability evaluation on the schematic representation of road network maps.In this evaluation,two actual road maps are used and the latest automatic schematic method with consideration of all available design rules is adopted to generate schematic representation of road maps.The usability of road map schematic representations is evaluated and analyzed from the three aspects,i.e.effectiveness,efficiency and user satisfaction.The research works involved in this study are as follows:(1)Developing a new method for the usability evaluation of schematic road maps.In this method,a latest automatic schematic method is adopted to generate the schematic representations of road maps,and a psychology test and an eye tracking test are designed from three aspects including effectiveness,efficiency and users’ satisfactions.To evaluate the usability of road schematic maps.(2)Conducting the usability evaluation experiment: in this experiment.two road maps are used and 65 participants are involved in the psychology test and eye-tracking experiment.The experiment analysis was conducted according to the results of questionnaires,and completing time of map tasks,and the gaze heat map and eye movement trajectory.(3)According to the results of above experiment,the bias of segment directions and the changing of spatial density distribution before and after schematization may result in the decrease of the cognition efficiency of schematic road maps.Hence this study conducted an evaluation experiment to check whether cognition efficiency can be improved after the direction correction of segments and readjustment of spatial density distribution to keeping the similar to original maps.The experimental results in this study show:(1)schematic representation of road maps can improve the simplification,clarity and user satisfaction of road maps,and has higher cognitive efficiency,especially for complex road networks;(2)for a large directional deviation of segments compared with the original shape and the increase of the spatial density on a map region after schematization,the cognitive efficiency of the schematic map may be reduced;(3)the simplification of road shapes in the schematic map may influence the route-decision behaviors,i.e.different route selection results on original road map and its schematized resultant map.The evaluation results of this study contribute to the improvements for cognition effectiveness and efficiency of schematic representation of road maps and the design rules of automatic schematization so as to schematic expression rules and method optimization of road maps,and can further enhance the usability and practicability of the schematic representation of maps.