Influence of Anchor Management on Anchored Navigation in Mobile Maps

Map-based services have increasingly become more important in our daily life, especially mobile maps. However, the screen constraints on mobile devices significantly increases the mode-switching between panning and zooming when trying to retrieve map data which negatively affects the user experience. The Anchored Zoom (AZ) is one of the techniques that have been proposed to overcome this problem, but it has some limitations concerning the use of its anchor point, i.e. a point of reference that serves as a major tool to control zooming in this technique. This paper presents the Anchored Zoom with Anchor Management (AZAM), a new technique that extends AZ by adding an anchor management to it, i.e., by adding new features that better exploit the use of anchors, improving the choice of new anchors and access to the previous ones. We evaluated both techniques, AZ and AZAM, and we also investigated their relevance in comparison with the popular Pinch to Zoom (PZ) technique. The study reveals that AZAM is superior to AZ in perceived satisfaction and that it serves as a complement to PZ during visual search tasks.