The Effects of Interaction Mode and Individual Differences on Usability and User Experience of Mobile Augmented Reality Navigation

In the context of the rapid development of navigation technology and the deepening of users’ diversified needs, as an emerging public service, mobile AR (Augmented Reality) navigation is supposed to focus on human-computer interaction and user experience. To extract the influencing factors of efficient service of mobile AR navigation, we constructed an experimental method for the usability of mobile AR navigation and the users’ emotional experience based on behavior-emotion analysis. In this study, the user types were divided according to the differences in Mental Cutting Ability and Gender. We explored the effects of Interaction Mode, Mental Cutting Ability, and Gender on the usability of mobile AR navigation and the users’ PAD (Please-Arousal-Dominance) three-dimensional emotion through the objective performance and subjective scoring of users when completing AR navigation tasks. The results showed that the Interaction Mode and Mental Cutting Ability had significant effects on the usability of mobile AR navigation and the users’ emotional experience; the Ease of Learning, Ease of Use in usability indicators, and the Arousal experience of three-dimensional emotion were significantly affected by Gender. Based on the experimental results, we excavated the mechanism of effects between various factors, extracted the behavioral and emotional trends of different types of users, broadened the research scope of mobile AR navigation-related fields, and finally summarized the design strategies from the perspective of human-robot-environment.