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When giving directions, we should treat the end points differently depending on whether the user knows them well or not.
When printing out driving directions to a destination, I tend to
spend about five minutes fussing over the map so that:
- everything fits on a page
- there's a fairly close-up
map of the destination.
If you're driving in a country that has a reasonably good highway network, that's probably the information you need, too - because you know perfectly well how to get to the highway near your point of departure; you just don't know how to navigate the grid of little streets near the destination.
Many systems, google for example, treat all endpoints the same, and offer me a choice between a big map for everything or many small maps for the individual turns - but what I really want is a big map for the destination only, for the part I don't know.
Similar things apply to the verbal directions - I know by now how to get to I-880 South; the system could instruct me to just "get to I-880 south", without giving turn-by-turn directions that only take up space.
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Would it take longer for you to explain to the system which
parts of the journey you know well than it does to print or
format the uncustomized directions? |
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On the map site, you could draw boxes around areas you know well, which could be saved in your cookies. |
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But you don't know *everything* in that region. If you live in an urban area, you probably know all motorways within 5 miles of where you live, all major roads within 1 mile and all minor roads within half a mile. The mapping service just needs to know your home address and have some sort of algorithm like this. |
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I don't think I'd trust an algorithm to decide what I knew,
because I invariably know less stuff about more things than
I thought I knew. |
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Also, if you know the journey from A to B and only need
directions from B to C, why not just ask the online map for
directions from B to C? (Yes, I know, you have to first
ascertain that you need to go via B, but that's not too
much of an effort, shirley?) |
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Not a bad idea, I just don't see how the software can
second-guess you without a lot of tedious inputting. |
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I guess the inventor of a heuristic always thinks it will do exactly what they want - point taken. |
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How about I could select one of the turn-by-turn instructions in the "formatted for printing" page and say the equivalent of "Yes, yes, I know how to get there, go on". Then they turn into one instruction: "get to <endpoint of journey so far>." |
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> from B to C
After a bit of thought, I did something like that - my printed directions now take me to tomorrow's destination from "I-880 South", which happens to lie on the actual route. But for long highways, the right names can be hard to guess, and of course you do have to also know the rough overall direction beforehand. |
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You may be right - I guess it depends on your own
situation. |
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I was thinking about how this would have worked for me
on recent longish trips. In most cases, it could have said
something like "Join the M11 towards London from the
roundabout near Waitrose", and saved a few lines of
directions. But if it had said "Get on to the M11
southbound at junction 10", I would have had to go and
check whether J10 was the one I thought it was, or not. In
other words, my idiosyncratic navigational repertoire
would not dovetail with any obvious algorithm. But maybe
that's just me. |
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Perhaps it would work if it showed the complete route on
screen, and then allowed you to select part of it and say "I
know this bit", before producing an abbreviated display
and printout. |
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[Jutta], only you know what you do not know. |
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A very good premise - I share this frustration. This is also the reason that I will not buy a SatNav. Each time I have been in a car using TomTom it has failed to get me to the correct end destination. It is only half a mile or so away but nevertheless this is the only really salient information for me.
An amusing/frustrating incident from my past: I needed to get to a Thames Water site in Reading (UK) from my home approx 100 miles away. Asking my boss for directions as he had been there before he proceeded to explain for 5 minutes the (almost entirely inaccurate) way for the journey and finished with "..and now you are in Reading." The fact that I could probably drive to Reading with my eyes shut but still did not know where I was going seemed to elude him. |
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"I wouldn't start from here." |
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+ ......or "ya can't there from here"..... |
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Yip I do this manually everytime and it is taking up valuable drinking time... |
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