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Research and development project · completed

Independo Maps

Making navigation understandable – without relying on text.

Digital maps and navigation apps often assume that people can read and write place names and understand abstract map symbols. Independo Maps explored how maps and navigation could rely more strongly on pictograms, photographs and visual orientation cues.

Duration
2023 – 2025
Funding
netidee · Call 18
Results
Open-source plugin, prototypes and a documented design process
Awards
  • Martin Prager Integration Award
  • Content Vienna 2024 · Digital Literacy

Project page at netidee (opens in a new tab)

When navigation becomes a folder

Digital navigation often feels simple: enter a destination, choose a route and go. But when an application assumes that place names can be read or typed, it creates a barrier.

In our research, we encountered very different navigation tools: printed photographs of landmarks, arrows drawn onto those photographs and physical navigation folders prepared for recurring routes.

How can digital navigation work when text cannot be a prerequisite?

On our blog: Away with the navigation folder, towards the digital map

Understanding orientation together

  1. Step 1

    Understand

    Together with potential users and partner organisations, we explored how people currently plan and navigate familiar and unfamiliar routes.

  2. Step 2

    Make barriers visible

    Workshops and user journeys helped identify situations where existing map and navigation systems were not understandable or flexible enough.

  3. Step 3

    Define needs

    These observations led to concrete requirements: choosing destinations without text input, receiving visual guidance, recognising landmarks and being able to reach support quickly.

  4. Step 4

    Develop ideas

    Ideation methods and user flows were used to explore and structure different approaches.

  5. Step 5

    Create prototypes

    From early wireframes to detailed visual prototypes, we explored what a more image-based navigation experience could look like.

Approaches to understandable navigation

Prototype screen headed Navigation: fields for the current location and the destination, below them favourites and saved routes shown as pictograms such as baker, supermarket, work and friend instead of place names.
Destinations, favourites and saved routes can be chosen from symbols instead of a typed place name.
Prototype screen headed Meine Routen: three saved journeys, each a pair of pictograms with an arrow between them, for example home to work.
Frequent journeys are listed as a pair of symbols, with no place name to read.
Prototype screen: at the top, start and destination as pictograms, my location and baker; below, a map with the route drawn on it and a Start button.
Start and destination stay visible as symbols while the route is drawn on the map.
Prototype screen showing a map of Vienna: a route from point A to point B with three photographs of landmarks pinned along the way.
A saved route shows photographs of its landmarks – the same orientation aid many people currently carry as printouts in a folder.

The result: an open-source plugin

The netidee project produced Leaflet Independo Maps, an open-source plugin for the Leaflet map library. It enriches digital maps with pictogram-based information and can be used and extended by other software teams in their own applications.

View our open-source projects

The Independo Maps app concept

The subsequent design process expanded the question beyond the map plugin. It explored a broader image-based navigation experience including symbol-based destination search, personal locations, visual routes, photographed landmarks, help functions and approaches to mixed-reality navigation.

This produced a concept and an interactive prototype. There is no standalone Independo Maps app: the concept was never built into one, and it is not being pursued at the moment.

Prototype screen titled Neue Route with a hint to tap the map to place new waypoints; a path between two points is already drawn on the map.
From the design process: routes can be assembled by placing waypoints directly on the map.

What we learned

The project showed that replacing text on a map with pictograms is only one part of the problem.

Orientation also depends on which information matters in a given situation, how a route can be recognised, what level of abstraction works for a person and what happens when support is needed.

This broadened the original technical approach and showed how much more an accessible standalone navigation system would have to address beyond the map itself.

An understandable map is not the same as understandable navigation.

Funded and recognised

Further reading on our blog

Away with the navigation folder, towards the digital map

Read article ⟶

What new applications is Independo exploring?

Read article ⟶

Results & resources

The project is complete. Code, documentation, a live demo and the project reports are publicly available.

The prototype screens on this page show Metacom symbols © Annette Kitzinger, metacom-symbole.de. All licence notices

More research at Independo

Every project has its own page, with the question behind it, how we work and what has been published so far.

View all research projects