People of low literacy could benefit from automated support when learning about societal participation. We design an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) ‘coach’ that can provide effective learning support to low-literate learners, develop a prototype virtual learning environment, and evaluate this prototype with low-literate end users. First, we inventory the learning support benefits of ECA coaching. Second, we update existing requirements to better specify functional demands for the coach ECA. Third, we write use cases and develop the prototype. Finally, we evaluate the prototype with low-literate users in a mixed-method within-subjects experiment. Results show that the coach influences the subjective learning experience: Participants report higher positive affect, higher user-system engagement, and increased self-efficacy regarding online banking. These results particularly apply to the domain of challenging information skills exercises. Caveats apply: One of four exercises was significantly more difficult than the other three; and coach support rules were not clearly formalized.

Improvements in navigation technology have made pedestrian guidance so easy, concerns have been raised over possible negative consequences. In particular, users may lose the ability to form mental maps, which may result in an undesired dependency on navigation tools. It has been proposed that better spatial awareness may be achieved by forcing users to expend greater effort in the navigation process. However, this runs against the general concepts of usability which seek to increase ease-of-use. Prior studies have either been inconclusive or profess to have created effort-inducing features that may not appeal to users. Practical usability is one focus of our research and we present an interface that addresses this focus while balancing navigation efficiency with acquisition of spatial knowledge. We report on promising preliminary results of observed user-tool interaction while we continue to collect data for this work in progress.

By overlaying virtual guidance information directly over the surrounding environment, Augmented Reality (AR) is seen as an easy alternative to maps for pedestrians navigating in unfamiliar urban environments. It is hypothesized, however, that easing navigation tasks would result in weaker cognitive maps, leaving users more vulnerable to becoming lost should their navigation device fail. We describe an outdoor navigation study that highlighted the gap between theoretical expectations and real world testing with navigation tools. We addressed the issues by creating a simulation system for testing navigation tools and report on the results of a study comparing AR with maps. We then extended the system to support simultaneous secondary tasks to assess relative workload. We present this as a way of objectively measuring relative cognitive effort expended on navigation tool use. Our findings are helpful in the design of mobile pedestrian navigation tools seeking to balance navigational efficiency with mental map formation.