Visualizing Location Uncertainty on Mobile Devices: Assessing Users’ Perception and Preferences

Location information is rarely perfectly accurate: usually it is subject to variations, errors and uncertainty, which may affect the quality of location-based services such as Pedestrian Navigation Systems (PNS). Visualizing location uncertainty is one option to address this issue. However, it is unclear how users interpret these visualizations. This paper investigated whether different types and styles of visualizing location uncertainty on mobile devices have an impact on user’s perceptions, and which options they prefer. We also proposed a new visualization (cloud shape) to represent location uncertainty and compared it to the two existing shapes (circle and colored street segments—CSS). Results indicate that the design and the style of a visualization influence users’ understanding of where they are located. More importantly, results indicated that the cloud could be a better option to visualize the uncertainty if the uncertainty of location information is very high. These findings can be used by the designers to modify/change the shape and style of the visualization to provide users with a more accurate picture of the quality of location information.