Lighting the way: Ambient Light’s influence on Mobile Map App Usage

Mobile map applications have become ubiquitous in the 21st century, supporting daily needs from commuting to travel and navigation need. Understanding how contextual factors influence interactions with mobile map apps is crucial for improving user experience. While prior research has explored how other elements, like motion or sense of direction, affect map app usage, the role of ambient light has received less attention, despite its known impact on visibility, perception and cognition (Song & Yamada, 2019; Tigwell et al., 2018). This thesis examines how ambient light influences mobile map app usage by analysing tappigraphy data collected from the MapOnTap project, combining ambient light and GPS data obtained from smartphone sensors in a privacy-conscious, unobtrusive manner. Tappigraphy, a method adapted from neuroscience, captures users’ touchscreen interactions passively, allowing for a naturalistic understanding of behaviour. As a highly dynamic factor, ambient light varies by weather, time of day, physical environment, and even phone positioning. To account for these variables, a lightweight indoor-outdoor detection model was developed by combining GPS coordinates with light sensor data. This enabled a contextualised analysis that considered both temporal and spatial dimensions of light exposure. Findings suggest that there is less general phone usage but more map app usage proportion in strong light situation, possibly indicating that users use mobile map more often in outdoors. On the other hand, it found that large variation in ambient light associate with reduced map app usage and slower tapping speed, visual discomfort or situational impairments like screen glare might explain such patterns. It also noted that ambient light alone was not a strong indicator of environment detection, but with combining it with other context data, it can still serve as a proxy to distinguish environmental states in a lightweight algorithm. This study demonstrate how minimal, privacy-preserving data can be leveraged to analysed mobile map usage and provide insights into how users engage with mobile maps under different environmental conditions. It highlights the importance of including ambient light as a contextual factor in mobile app design and suggests that lightweight, privacy-conscious methods can offer valuable insight into real-world user experience. It is expected to contribute to research in Human Computer Interaction by promoting more adaptive and environmentally aware design for map applications.