Hi, I’m Gian-Luca
I am a quantitative UX researcher with a focus on geographical data, mobile navigation, and user behavior. I am passionate about digging into data, uncovering relationships, and analyzing usage patterns to derive actionable insights. I have over six years of experience prototyping routing technologies and analyzing large datasets of purely quantitative data, as well as mixed datasets combining qualitative and quantitative user data.
Route Preview Navigation
Contrary to popular belief, most pedestrians actually don’t use the turn by turn navigation in mobile map applications. They usually just pull up the route, start walking, and then occasionally check their phone to see if they are still on the right track. In this project, I designed and conducted a large scale online survey through Prolific to find that almost half of all respondents prefer this kind of route preview instead of the turn by turn navigation. This number increases a lot when walking through familiar environments. We then compared the navigation performance between both navigation modes with 195 participants in a field study. Using multivariate regression analysis and inferential statistics, we found no significant difference in terms of navigation efficiency. Lastly, in a co design workshop, we designed new features to enrich the route preview navigation mode even further, making it a preferred alternative to turn by turn navigation for pedestrians. The results of this study coincided with glanceable directions while navigating in Google Maps, improving pedestrian navigation for millions of people.
Multi-Criteria Routing
or the past two decades, every navigation service for pedestrians optimized for the shortest path. This is in line with people’s preferences when asked what is most important for them in a navigation assistant. However, the shortest path can often result in an efficient but boring or unexciting journey, which is okay when you are in a hurry, but not so much when you want to enjoy the walk. This is why we built FlexRoute, a multi-criteria routing algorithm based on users’ preference of OSM labels in their vicinity. Want to do some window shopping while going to the train station?! Just pick your preference and FlexRoute comes up with a still efficient but more enjoyable path for you to walk.
Compass Navigation for Cyclists
Mobile navigation technology has primarily been developed for car drivers back in the day and was quickly copy and pasted for other road users like pedestrians and cyclists. And while we are slowly starting to see custom solutions for these different user groups, today, still, most user interfaces and interactions with mobile map applications are not really optimized for them. This is why we experimented with alternative navigation approaches for cyclists. We developed a compass-based navigation application for cyclists that, instead of giving map-based turn by turn instructions, just points towards the final destination, leaving the intermediate decision making to the cyclists. This allows them to freely choose one road over another based on road surface or traffic conditions while still aligning with the general direction of the destination. We furthermore analyzed this routing approach in a Python-based simulation through a virtual agent in over 1600 cities across the globe!
