Play it by ear: a case for serendipitous discovery of places with musicons

Current location-based services (LBS) typically allow users to locate points of interest (POI) in their vicinity but can detract from the user's emotional experience of exploring a new location. In this paper, we examine how cues in the form of popular music (musicons) can emotionally engage users and enhance their experience of discovering nearby POIs serendipitously in unfamiliar places. The primary contribution of this paper is a field study, in which we evaluate the performance and emotional engagement of different types of audio-based cues for directing users' attention to specific POIs. Musicons and mixed-modality cues performed close to visual and speech cues, and significantly better than auditory icons, for POI identification while creating a much more pleasant and engaging user experience. We conclude that cues for POI discovery need not always be as explicit as the baseline visual cues. Indeed, the most challenging cues, auditory icons, led to a heightened sense of autonomy.