Hey You! Let’s Talk. Dialogue-Initiatives Revisited for Wayfinding Instructions

Abstract. This paper presents Human-Computer Interaction design guidelines for interactive wayfinding assistance systems which provide on-line route instructions. These design suggestions are based on a corpus of human-to-human, on-line, landmark-based route instructions in German language which were gathered by means of an in-situ study involving pairs of participants. Based on the description of this collection, which is made publicly available, an in-depth analysis of the corpus is presented: This analysis reveals the importance of establishing Common Ground through existential-presentative constructions which have, up until now, not been taken into account in presenting route instructions to users of pedestrian navigation systems. These syntactical constructs provide the empirical ground for two important design suggestions: Systems should, first, ask for explicit feedback whether a salient object is recognised by users before referring to this object in a route instruction. Second, a mode of negotiating Common Ground once it was lost should be implemented, which can be initiated by the user. The results reveal the importance of the state-tracking capabilities of wayfinding assistance systems.