The Effect of Day and Night Mode on the Perception of Map Navigation Device

Day and night mode is widely used when working with any digital device, including map navigation. Many users have the day and night mode change set automatically. However, it is not proven if this functionality helps improve the transfer of information between the map and the user when changing the lighting conditions. The short paper aims to evaluate the influence of day and night modes on the map users’ perception. User testing was realised in the eye-tracking laboratory with 43 participants. These participants were categorised by the average number of hours spent driving per week and their use of map navigation. The eye-tracking experiment focuses on the orientation of the participants in the day and night mode of map views when changing the lighting conditions. For that, the Euro Truck Simulator game environment was chosen, where the participants were guided by the map navigation in the bottom right corner of the screen. The lighting conditions in the ET laboratory have been adjusted to match the lighting conditions for both day and night as realistically as possible, and the map navigation mode was switched between day and night mode. The explanatory research suggested that using day mode during nighttime may cause disorientation and dazzle; using night mode during daytime does not cause that problem, but the user perception is slightly slower.