Understanding Map Operations in Location-based Surveys

Location-based surveys have been moving to handheld computing devices as the availability of such devices has become more common. The more limited screen size of the handheld devices has made the maps more difficult to use. The present work looks at the map operations of users to determine if they are having problems. Two studies have been analyzed to get an understanding of the types of patterns that might be used to identify users that are having trouble. The choice of the two studies was to find two studies that were quite different and use one of the studies to find patterns of map operations that would indicate that a user was having problems. The second study could then be used to test the relevance of the patterns in a different implementation of the same task. We have identified patterns of interest using the data from the first study and found that the same patterns were relevant in the second study.