Lovelace, Kristin L. (1998). Good route directions in familiar and unfamiliar environments.
Unpublished paper, Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara.

Route directions are verbal instructions that explain how to get from one place to another. There is no commonly accepted characterization of what constitutes 'good' route directions. The current exploratory studies examine several methods for assessing route direction quality via quantitative measurements of their components and qualitative ratings of their goodness, and explores verbal and spatial abilities potentially contributing to the ability to produce good route directions. Route directions for both familiar and unfamiliar routes were studied.

We were able to reliably measure route direction quality on an ordinal rating scale. These ratings were correlated with counts of the components of the route directions. More complete route directions are rated as being of higher quality. For all routes, inclusion of more segment and turn mentions were correlated with higher quality route directions. Differences in the quality of route descriptions for familiar versus unfamiliar routes seems to be related to the types of landmarks included.

No strong evidence was found for contribution of spatial or verbal abilities as measured by psychometric tests. Environmental spatial ability, such as spatial memory, seems important to production of route directions about unfamiliar routes.