Real-Time Public Transport Navigation on Smartwatches: A Comparison with a Smartphone-based Solution

In a rapidly growing mobile device market, a new and unique type of IT product, the smartwatch, has started gaining the users' attention. After several years of technological development, it has finally become a viable device that extends the functions of a smartphone to a more intimate level. In the industry of smart devices, particularly in wearable devices, smartwatches are widely considered as the next big thing which is going to have a significant impact on our daily lives. However, smartwatches still have a limited use in public transport information systems. In this paper, we present promising use cases for smartwatches in public transport which were extracted through a survey questionnaire we conducted. We designed and developed a prototype to realize one of the most promising use cases: real-time public transport navigation. We evaluated our prototype in a comprehensive user study. The comparison of the smartwatch-based navigation with a pure smartphone-based solution shows that the smartwatch outperforms the smartphone in all user experience metrics.