Exploring mobile map app usage: A geospatial study of touchscreen interactions and contextual influences

Mobile map applications serve as versatile tools for modern navigation and location-based searches, aiding activities ranging from exploring unfamiliar areas, planning routes from home, to purchasing public transport tickets while traveling. Despite their widespread use across various contexts, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how these diverse situations influence user interactions with smartphones. This work aimed to discern the behavioral patterns of mobile map app usage, with a particular focus on how these patterns vary based on user mobility (stationary vs. non-stationary) and various contextual factors such as home and work locations, points of interest (POIs) and transportation modes. Employing tappigraphy, an ecological momentary assessment that captures taps with high temporal resolution and ecological validity (Reichenbacher and Bartling, 2023; Zingaro et al., 2023; Zingaro and Reichenbacher, 2022), this thesis examined touchscreen interactions in conjunction with GPS data to investigate the use of mobile map apps in real-world environments. A geospatial analysis was performed on the data from 39 participants with use of the Trackintel library (Martin et al., 2023). The findings suggest that map app usage is influenced by the user’s mobility state, with distinct apps being preferred depending on the use context. The study concludes that enriching tap data with location-based context improves understanding of mobile app behavior, thereby providing valuable insights for app developers to improve usability and user experience.