Abstract
This paper examined four touchscreen methods for entering a destination into a route guidance system. Three of the interfaces were character entry-based including: 1) A method using a sequence of two buttons for each alphanumeric entry (referred to as Doublepress), 2) A Qwerty keypad layout, and 3) A phone-based keypad where letters were entered using their corresponding number key. The fourth interface provided an alphabetic list through which a user scrolled to select a city or street name.
Sixteen subjects used each of the interfaces to enter destinations in a laboratory study while “parked” and while driving a simulator. The entry methods were evaluated based on entry time, driving performance, errors, preferences and perceived difficulty. Overall address entry times were fastest for the Phonepad (43 seconds) and Qwerty (45 seconds) methods followed by the Scrolling list (56 seconds) and Doublepress (75 seconds) methods. Entry time was significantly affected by driver age. Driving performance (deviation of lane position) was significantly worse when entering a destination as compared to baseline driving. Participants rated the difficulty of destination entry only slightly higher than that of conventional driving tasks. There was no evident preference for a particular entry method.
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