Designing and evaluating technologies to guide and nudge navigational decision-making

Abstract

Sensory environmental cues influence our emotions and behaviours in ways beyond our consciousness. The way that these cues communicate information and influence behaviours and decisions implicitly has motivated the design of ambient technologies. With their goal of communicating information peripherally and without affecting the user's primary task, several cues have been used in their design to communicate information including light, movement and sound. In addition to communicating information peripherally, many ambient technologies have been designed to unobtrusively influence and alter various behaviours and decisions. However, little is known about how ambient technologies can be leveraged to implicitly influence and guide people's navigation decisions while exploring novel spaces. Such technologies are essential to facilitate navigation and provide seamless navigational guidance within indoor environments (e.g. museums) without negatively affecting the individual's primary task of exploration. In addition, these technologies are crucial in managing visitors' circulation in public spaces in cases of crowding or pandemics.

This thesis explores how can ambient technologies be utilised to unobtrusively facilitate, guide and nudge navigational decision-making while exploring unfamiliar environments. To deliver unobtrusive feedback in ambient technologies, I started by exploring the use of a low cue level that falls below the threshold of conscious perception (i.e. subliminal cues) and whether and how such cues can be used in ambient technologies to influence decision-making using the priming mechanism. The empirical findings showed that such subliminal cues are not suitable for use in ambient technologies and therefore, I explored next a higher cue level, which is a perceptible cue that influences behaviours and decision-making without awareness (i.e. supraliminal cues). These cues are delivered through the nudging approach. I particularly examined two nudging mechanisms: Social Norms, which uses supraliminal social cues in interactive floor interfaces and Salience, which uses supraliminal physical cues of shape-changing walls. I investigated how can such ambient technologies be designed to influence navigational decision-making using these nudging mechanisms and evaluated the influence of the designed technologies on navigation decisions. This thesis contributes to the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by providing novel insights into the use of subliminal cues in ambient technologies, the design of supraliminal social and physical cues in ambient technologies to influence navigation decisions and the impact of the designed technologies on navigational decision-making.

Date of Award	27 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Oussama Metatla (Supervisor) & Anne Roudaut (Supervisor)