Multimodal interfaces for dynamic interactive maps

Dynamic interactive maps with transparent but power-ful human interface capabilities are beginning to emerge for a variety of geographical information systems, in-cluding ones situated on portables for travelers, stu-dents, business and service people, and others working in field settings. In the present research, interfaces sup-porting spoken, pen-based, and multimodal input were analyze for their potential effectiveness in interacting with this new generation of map systems. Input modal-ity (speech, writing, multimodal) and map display for-mat (highly versus minimally structured) were varied in a within-subject factorial design as people completed re-alistic tasks with a simulated map system. The results identified a constellation of performance difficulties asso-ciated with speech-only map interactions, including ele-vated performance errors, spontaneous disfluencies, and lengthier task completion time-- problems that declined substantially when people could interact multimodally with the map. These performance advantages also mir-rored a strong user preference to interact multimodally. The error-proneness and unacceptability of speech-only input to maps was attributed in large part to peoples difficulty generating spoken descriptions of spatial loca-tion. Analyses also indicated that map display format can be used to minimize performance errors and dis-fluencies, and map interfaces that guide users speech toward brevity can nearly eliminate disfiuencies. Impli-cations of this research are discussed for the design of high-performance multimodal interfaces for future map systems.