Guide me through somewhere important: Decision-point salience and collaborative navigation

People often work together to collaboratively navigate environments. Unfortunately, people make mistakes when giving directions to others, which can be especially troublesome when giving directions via a cell phone to a partner that cannot be physically seen. To facilitate collaborative navigation between spatially separated partners, contemporary navigational aids provide information about important landmarks and decision points in an environment. To learn more about what kinds of mistakes people make in navigating and the problems they have in giving and receiving route directions, this article presents an empirical study on dynamic, collaborative wayfinding, which looked at decision points where wayfinders made navigational errors. We found metrics rating the salience of decision points in an environment that correlate with where people tended to make mistakes in navigation, and argue that navigational aids could highlight these points to wayfinders so that they can pay special attention when giving directions traversing these points. We finish by outlining how the lessons learned in this study can be applied to real-time navigational aids.