With the rapid increase in the number of cars in Korea, navigations which have slowly been distributed since late in the 1990s are now becoming a necessary article for cars, not an option. It is because as a street and transportation information provi...
With the rapid increase in the number of cars in Korea, navigations which have slowly been distributed since late in the 1990s are now becoming a necessary article for cars, not an option. It is because as a street and transportation information provision system to inform the optimum route in consideration of distance from the present location to the destination, car navigations are the most important application of telematics and are becoming the key of digital convergence. Such navigations are divided into Before Market (BM) and After Market (AM) according to the stage of purchasing hardware to provide service; most of those products on sale now are after-market navigations.
It was estimated that as 16 million cars were registered in 2007 and about 5 million navigations were sold on a cumulative basis, about 31% of all drivers were using a navigation ; navigations on AM sale took the lead. At the beginning of navigation introduction, its market was formed on the basis of smaller firms easy to invade relatively small niche market rather than large ones because it was too small and trifling; thus, most of those AM navigations currently on sale are produced and sold by smaller firms. As a result of business group formation on the basis of smaller firms with relatively insufficient financing and research personnel as compared with large ones, most AM navigations involve serious inconvenience and risks to hinder safe driving; nevertheless, they are directly being sold to consumers, so many consumers using AM navigations are actually exposed to serious risks.
This study aimed to solve this problem and tried to find out problems of AM navigations through an in-depth survey of users and researches and test with users rather than summing up and describing the existing literature or data based on simple data. An attempt was made to indicate problems more scientifically and concretely on the data about human beings' cognitive and perceptive process, perform comparative analysis with prior research data in terms of the navigation-related areas, investigate researches by lots of major automobile companies highly related to navigations and the development process of in-car navigations and up-to-date equipment embodied by them, consider how they were applied for safe driving, examine communities of the reexamined data to compare with the previously-tested data, followed by analysis and application, and finally suggest a new design guideline for AM navigations.
In the final design stage, design of AM navigations which users can use more safely and conveniently by the suggested design guide was suggested, which then went through usability test to suggest the most ideal final design.
It should be noted that this study was conducted in AM navigations currently taking the lead in the domestic navigation market; legal regulations on usage and function realization of AM navigations were not mentioned because there have yet been no legislations or regulations on AM navigations in Korea, contrary to other countries. It is hoped that legal regulations will be made on usage and functionality of AM navigations in moving cars.