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One tip I like is to set your navigation app to "north up". This way you're aware which direction (in general) you're heading towards. If you know you're going

One tip I like is to set your navigation app to "north up". This way you're aware which direction (in general) you're heading towards. If you know you're going south east and there's a detour, you know you need to find a parallel street heading south-east-ish. If translating the arrow pointing left and the next turn is down to "turn right ahead" is confusing, on Google Maps at least the top of the screen still has arrows pointing left or right how far away you are from the turn, so this info is still there. The tip is from Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear, who does a lot of driving.

svat 3y ago
Strong agree; came here to recommend this — this is something I came up with by myself and thought I was the only one who did this; glad to find others think the same. Doing this has greatly improved my sense of direction (to much better than it was before I started using GPS/navigation). It's like getting instant feedback for your direction sense (e.g. I was driving west and just now I turned left, so I'm now driving south), and remaining oriented about where different places are wrt each other. A couple of screenshots for anyone confused: Before: https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264/902/953/418/114/original/f0c9c6c153701ad7.png https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264... After: https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264/905/223/072/469/original/f92d052bb173f0bd.png https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264...
- naasking 3y ago
  This is probably only good for people who already have good spatial reasoning and can make the transformation on the fly from screen orientation to what you're seeing ahead of you. Many people have poor spatial reasoning skills though, and probably find the direct view more useful.
  - svat 3y ago
    I don't think of myself as having good spatial reasoning, but it still works for me — note that if you look at the top part of the UI (in the grey box covering the map), the arrows are still relative to "you". So at least in the first few days of trying out this orientation, one could just rely on the arrows for turns, and use the rest of the map only to reinforce/build their spatial transformation (rotation) skills.
analog31 3y ago
I have to have my map on "north up" or I get lost. I'm 60. I also grew up in the US Midwest, where there's a NSEW square grid of roads over a large portion of the region.
emmelaich 3y ago
I usually "north up" but when navigating, the navigation view gives you more of what's ahead in screen space. I wish "north up" would do the same; I'm sure it's do-able.
- xtreme 3y ago
  It's not doable because your current location needs to be in the center of the screen in north up mode but can be placed lower in regular mode. Also the non square aspect ratio of the phone screen means that you don't get the same field of view in all four directions.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > your current location needs to be in the center of the screen in north up mode No it doesn't, so you just identified an easy opportunity for improvement.
    - boneitis 3y ago
      Thank. You.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  My car has two screens, a big one for the overview map and a small one for the "next turn" map. I always said the big view to north up. Works well.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    Did you set it up that way, or did it come that way? If the latter what car model comes with 2 screens you can use for navigation?
    - LeoPanthera 3y ago
      Tesla Model X, the old kind with the vertical screen. (However, please don't take this as a recommendation for Tesla cars. I would never buy another one.)
Animats 3y ago
Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems (Etak, pre-GPS), once told me that they started out with always displaying maps with north at the top. He's a sailor, and sailors have used maps with north at the top for centuries. So the car nav system just followed marine navigation. They discovered in user testing that about 20% of the population cannot rotate a map in their head. So they rotated the map in software. Keeping the labels in normal orientation was tough. Now everybody does that.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  This is a good example of accessibility tradeoff - it obviously was needed to make the solution accessible and usable for that 20%, but in the process it made it worse for at least some of the 80%..
- b33j0r 3y ago
  A compass rose is pretty much the same concept as the XYZ widget in any 3D app, a reference frame. I’m wondering. Since cartography was pretty well established by the 20th century, was this really much of a debate for nav systems? If I asked you to draw a map of the room you’re in, I highly doubt you’d orient the straight angles of the walls with respect to the angle of your body. You’d draw them along a compass rose relative to the structure. Rotating a map to your gaze is actually not very intuitive when your goal is to usually to transform the world to be outside of your reference frame. The transformation of the map into your perspective is a last-mile problem: it’s important when you reduce your decisions to “what landmark is in front of me, and what is to my left and right?”
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - netsharc 3y ago
    I think a "my direction up" would work better if the compass direction is displayed on top of the screen, like on video game/military aircraft HUDs https://eu2.contabostorage.com/2baf1d556e44458999c03b1595ea080b:ag.eu.1.250/media/gunship-2000/4.jpg https://eu2.contabostorage.com/2baf1d556e44458999c03b1595ea0... , or since the directions are around the "you are here" marker, the N/E/S/W markers (and its subdivisions) could be placed on the 4 edges the screen, and would move around as the phone changes its heading. Someone else said elsewhere on this comment section, if only a navigation app would also show the position of the sun at that moment. If we already have the compass directions, the direction of the sun can be an extra UI element.
boneitis 3y ago
I want to say I'm astonished by this comment thread, but hey. It's to be expected these days. I would have theoretically said the same thing that the sibling comments are about getting north to be "up". But, that is already the default (at least on my phone), but who knows for how much longer. The app quite aggressively tries to keep you from getting comfortable with this mode but instead wants to derail your sense of direction in general. First, it was a minor inconvenience to lock your orientation, then they hid it deep inside a settings menu, before eventually removing entirely the ability to lock the map to the cardinal directions, and everyone I complain about this to acts like I'm crazy. I've long ago given up. I don't get it.
- yterdy 3y ago
  While we're fixing this, I'd also like a "South-up" option. Maybe even "West-up" or "East-up" one. I'm not joking. Beyond training one to think about their location in multiple orientations, it also opens your eyes to assumptions one makes about places based on their location. West Wing famously flipped the script (literally), but there's also the lateral bias to think about. Go into Google Maps and flip it 90 degrees; does your understanding of distance, shapes, and spatial relationships of "familiar" geography change?
hobofan 3y ago
I think the same goes for on-foot navigation. Anecdotally, I find that my friends that just willy-nilly rotate around their Google Maps are the ones that have the worst sense of direction. Of course you are going to get lost after one wrong turn if you throw out your frame of reference that would help to reorient yourself!
- giantg2 3y ago
  "I think the same goes for on-foot navigation." This is the absolute opposite. You orient your map to north (generally magnetic north when using magnetic compasses). If you have your map oriented for "north up" your headings will be all wrong.
giantg2 3y ago
To anyone who has done some actual navigation setting a map to "north-up" seems terrible. I'm pretty sure my GPS tells me what my general heading is, not that I've ever had to use it. If it works, it works. But I would strongly recommend that people try orienteering to learn about land nav.
- giantg2 3y ago
  Why disagree?
  - em-bee 3y ago
    because in orienteering you use compass that points into the direction you are moving while the compass needle points north. then you align the map with the needle, so your map points north too, and you end up looking at the map in the direction you are moving.
RajT88 3y ago
My wife likes to orient her GPS map according to the direction she is heading. I orefer North. I am the better navigator. Related: I have spent a lot more time in youth and adulthood wandering places on my own. She of course was discouraged from doing so for the reasons the article cites.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  I have the opposite preference (car direction up) despite being better at navigation than my partner who is bad and prefers north up. I also spent a lot of time wandering in woods and town on my own as a kid, and playing video games including RPGs and first person shooters that required navigation.

svat 3y ago

Strong agree; came here to recommend this — this is something I came up with by myself and thought I was the only one who did this; glad to find others think the same. Doing this has greatly improved my sense of direction (to much better than it was before I started using GPS/navigation). It's like getting instant feedback for your direction sense (e.g. I was driving west and just now I turned left, so I'm now driving south), and remaining oriented about where different places are wrt each other. A couple of screenshots for anyone confused: Before: https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264/902/953/418/114/original/f0c9c6c153701ad7.png https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264... After: https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264/905/223/072/469/original/f92d052bb173f0bd.png https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/264...

naasking 3y ago
This is probably only good for people who already have good spatial reasoning and can make the transformation on the fly from screen orientation to what you're seeing ahead of you. Many people have poor spatial reasoning skills though, and probably find the direct view more useful.
- svat 3y ago
  I don't think of myself as having good spatial reasoning, but it still works for me — note that if you look at the top part of the UI (in the grey box covering the map), the arrows are still relative to "you". So at least in the first few days of trying out this orientation, one could just rely on the arrows for turns, and use the rest of the map only to reinforce/build their spatial transformation (rotation) skills.

analog31 3y ago

I have to have my map on "north up" or I get lost. I'm 60. I also grew up in the US Midwest, where there's a NSEW square grid of roads over a large portion of the region.

emmelaich 3y ago

I usually "north up" but when navigating, the navigation view gives you more of what's ahead in screen space. I wish "north up" would do the same; I'm sure it's do-able.

xtreme 3y ago
It's not doable because your current location needs to be in the center of the screen in north up mode but can be placed lower in regular mode. Also the non square aspect ratio of the phone screen means that you don't get the same field of view in all four directions.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > your current location needs to be in the center of the screen in north up mode No it doesn't, so you just identified an easy opportunity for improvement.
  - boneitis 3y ago
    Thank. You.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
My car has two screens, a big one for the overview map and a small one for the "next turn" map. I always said the big view to north up. Works well.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Did you set it up that way, or did it come that way? If the latter what car model comes with 2 screens you can use for navigation?
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    Tesla Model X, the old kind with the vertical screen. (However, please don't take this as a recommendation for Tesla cars. I would never buy another one.)

Animats 3y ago

Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems (Etak, pre-GPS), once told me that they started out with always displaying maps with north at the top. He's a sailor, and sailors have used maps with north at the top for centuries. So the car nav system just followed marine navigation. They discovered in user testing that about 20% of the population cannot rotate a map in their head. So they rotated the map in software. Keeping the labels in normal orientation was tough. Now everybody does that.

PeterisP 3y ago
This is a good example of accessibility tradeoff - it obviously was needed to make the solution accessible and usable for that 20%, but in the process it made it worse for at least some of the 80%..
b33j0r 3y ago
A compass rose is pretty much the same concept as the XYZ widget in any 3D app, a reference frame. I’m wondering. Since cartography was pretty well established by the 20th century, was this really much of a debate for nav systems? If I asked you to draw a map of the room you’re in, I highly doubt you’d orient the straight angles of the walls with respect to the angle of your body. You’d draw them along a compass rose relative to the structure. Rotating a map to your gaze is actually not very intuitive when your goal is to usually to transform the world to be outside of your reference frame. The transformation of the map into your perspective is a last-mile problem: it’s important when you reduce your decisions to “what landmark is in front of me, and what is to my left and right?”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- netsharc 3y ago
  I think a "my direction up" would work better if the compass direction is displayed on top of the screen, like on video game/military aircraft HUDs https://eu2.contabostorage.com/2baf1d556e44458999c03b1595ea080b:ag.eu.1.250/media/gunship-2000/4.jpg https://eu2.contabostorage.com/2baf1d556e44458999c03b1595ea0... , or since the directions are around the "you are here" marker, the N/E/S/W markers (and its subdivisions) could be placed on the 4 edges the screen, and would move around as the phone changes its heading. Someone else said elsewhere on this comment section, if only a navigation app would also show the position of the sun at that moment. If we already have the compass directions, the direction of the sun can be an extra UI element.

boneitis 3y ago

I want to say I'm astonished by this comment thread, but hey. It's to be expected these days. I would have theoretically said the same thing that the sibling comments are about getting north to be "up". But, that is already the default (at least on my phone), but who knows for how much longer. The app quite aggressively tries to keep you from getting comfortable with this mode but instead wants to derail your sense of direction in general. First, it was a minor inconvenience to lock your orientation, then they hid it deep inside a settings menu, before eventually removing entirely the ability to lock the map to the cardinal directions, and everyone I complain about this to acts like I'm crazy. I've long ago given up. I don't get it.

yterdy 3y ago
While we're fixing this, I'd also like a "South-up" option. Maybe even "West-up" or "East-up" one. I'm not joking. Beyond training one to think about their location in multiple orientations, it also opens your eyes to assumptions one makes about places based on their location. West Wing famously flipped the script (literally), but there's also the lateral bias to think about. Go into Google Maps and flip it 90 degrees; does your understanding of distance, shapes, and spatial relationships of "familiar" geography change?

hobofan 3y ago

I think the same goes for on-foot navigation. Anecdotally, I find that my friends that just willy-nilly rotate around their Google Maps are the ones that have the worst sense of direction. Of course you are going to get lost after one wrong turn if you throw out your frame of reference that would help to reorient yourself!

giantg2 3y ago
"I think the same goes for on-foot navigation." This is the absolute opposite. You orient your map to north (generally magnetic north when using magnetic compasses). If you have your map oriented for "north up" your headings will be all wrong.

giantg2 3y ago

To anyone who has done some actual navigation setting a map to "north-up" seems terrible. I'm pretty sure my GPS tells me what my general heading is, not that I've ever had to use it. If it works, it works. But I would strongly recommend that people try orienteering to learn about land nav.

giantg2 3y ago
Why disagree?
- em-bee 3y ago
  because in orienteering you use compass that points into the direction you are moving while the compass needle points north. then you align the map with the needle, so your map points north too, and you end up looking at the map in the direction you are moving.

RajT88 3y ago

My wife likes to orient her GPS map according to the direction she is heading. I orefer North. I am the better navigator. Related: I have spent a lot more time in youth and adulthood wandering places on my own. She of course was discouraged from doing so for the reasons the article cites.

therealdrag0 3y ago
I have the opposite preference (car direction up) despite being better at navigation than my partner who is bad and prefers north up. I also spent a lot of time wandering in woods and town on my own as a kid, and playing video games including RPGs and first person shooters that required navigation.