Interaction Weaknesses of Personal Navigation Devices

Automotive navigation systems, especially portable navigation devices (PNDs), are gaining popularity worldwide.
Drivers increasingly rely on these devices to guide them to
their destination. Some follow them almost blindly, with
devastating consequences if the routing goes wrong. Wrong
messages as well as superfuous and unnecessary messages
can potentially reduce the credibility of those devices. We
performed a comparative study with current PNDs from different vendors and market segments, in order to assess the extent of this problem and how it is related to the interaction between device and driver. In this paper, we report the corresponding results and identify multiple interaction weaknesses that are prevalent throughout all tested device classes.