Interview — P04
Method: contextual inquiry / walk-along
Profile: F, late 20s, relocated ~6 weeks ago (from Manchester). Walks everywhere by choice, "gets hopelessly lost, daily." Self-rated map reliance: 9/10.
Route: met at Largo da Graça, task was to lead me to a café she'd been to once, down in Mouraria. ~25 min walk, she'd budgeted "like ten."
Recording: audio (consented). Raw notes below, lightly cleaned. [ ] = my observation, not her words.
Setup / warm-up
- Chose the task herself: "there's this café, I've been once, I could NOT tell you how I got there. Perfect, right?"
- Before we set off she opened the map app, set the pin, put the phone in her hand — not pocket.
[phone stays in hand the entire walk. never once pocketed it.]
The walk (verbatim + obs)
"Okay so I know it's down. Everything I want is always down and everything that's home is up. That's the only thing I actually know about this city."
[navigates by elevation before anything else. "down" = toward the river/center. This is her one stable frame.]
- First two minutes: confident, no phone glances. Then hit a fork (two descending alleys) and stopped dead.
"See, this is where it — okay. The map says left but that feels wrong. It feels like right."
[goes left, against her gut, trusting the app. Correct, but visibly unhappy about it.]
"I hate the blue dot. I do. Because when it works I don't remember anything — I just follow the dot like a — like a donkey following a carrot. And when it's wrong it's SO wrong. It spins. You know? By the water it just... spins. And then I panic."
- The spin. Came up three times unprompted.
[GPS drift in the narrow streets is a genuine emotional event for her, not a minor annoyance. She described a "spinning blue dot" as the trigger for near-panic.]
"In Manchester I never used this. Never. I knew Manchester in my body. Here I'm — I outsourced it before I ever learned it. I skipped the part where you learn a place and went straight to being dependent."
[strong. she frames map-reliance as having SKIPPED learning, not replaced it. "I never built the muscle here."]
- Lost the thread near a small square with a tiled saint on the wall. She recognized it:
"Oh — the tile. The saint. I remember the saint. I don't remember any street name, I couldn't tell you a single street name in this whole city, but I remember him."
[points at azulejo panel. First moment of unassisted recognition. Landmark = image, not name. Beamed.]
- From the saint tile onward she put the phone down (hand, but not looking) and navigated by memory for ~4 minutes. Got the café. Genuinely delighted.
"I did that bit myself! Did you see? I knew the saint and then I knew the smell — the bakery — and then I was just there."
Post-walk
- Asked what makes her feel lost vs. found:
"Found is when I recognize something before the phone tells me. Lost is when the phone is the only thing that knows where I am. Which is most of the time, honestly. It's lonely. Being navigated feels lonely, does that make sense?"
- On the diary study so far (day 2): logged one entry — a photo of a staircase captioned "took this so I'd know it again. did not know it again."
Patterns I'm seeing (P04)
- Elevation is her master frame — "up = home, down = everything else" is doing more work than any street grid.
- Landmarks are images and smells, never names — the tiled saint, the bakery smell. Zero street names retained after 6 weeks.
- The blue dot spinning = acute anxiety, specifically in narrow/waterside streets (GPS drift). This is an emotional failure mode, not a usability nitpick.
- She experiences map-reliance as a skill she never built — "outsourced it before I learned it." Guilt, not just convenience.
- The happiest moment was navigating a landmark chain unassisted. The app that helped her build that chain, instead of replacing it, would win her completely.
[→ P04 is the anxiety-of-the-blue-dot case in its purest form. Contrast hard with P07. See [Synthesis — Wayfinding](/demo/n/synthesis-wayfinding).]