Interview — P07
Method: contextual inquiry / walk-along (modified — he was working)
Profile: M, early 30s, bike courier ~3 years. Navigates the whole city daily on a fixed-gear. Self-rated map reliance: "1, and that's only for the pin on a new address."
Route: shadowed two real deliveries, Baixa up to Estrela. I couldn't keep up on foot for the descents; we talked at pickup/dropoff and I recorded his narration between.
Recording: audio (consented). [ ] = my observation.
On the map (he brought it up before I could)
"The map doesn't know the hills. That's the whole thing. It'll send you up a wall and back down the other side because on the screen it's a straight line. But my legs know it's a wall. The map is flat and the city is absolutely not flat."
[gradient is his primary cost function. He routes to minimize climbing, which the app's shortest-path logic actively fights. This is huge.]
"I don't do turn-by-turn. Can't. By the time the voice says 'turn right' I'm three streets past it and dead. You navigate by turn-by-turn, you're always a little bit in the future and a little bit in the past, never actually here. On a bike you have to be here."
How he actually navigates
- Asked him to describe his mental map. He laughed.
"It's not a map. It's more like — a feeling with landmarks stuck in it. I know the whole city as maybe forty spots I know know, and everything else is the strings between them. The fountain, the ugly pink building, the tree that drops the berries that'll kill your tyres in October. I navigate spot to spot."
[classic landmark-node network, not a Cartesian grid. He explicitly does NOT think in cardinal directions or street names — thinks in a graph of known places connected by remembered "strings."]
"New address comes in, I don't read the street. I find the nearest thing I know and I go 'okay it's near the fountain' and then I'm basically already there. The address is the last ten metres, not the journey."
- On landmarks being sensory/social, not visual only:
"Half my landmarks are smells or sounds, honestly. The fish place. The school at 3 when it lets out — you avoid that whole block or you die. The busker who's always on the same corner playing the same four songs, God bless him, he's a waypoint now. He doesn't know he's on my map."
"Light too. Late afternoon I know exactly which streets'll be a wall of sun in my eyes and I route around them. The map's got no idea what time it is."
Getting lost
- Asked when he last got lost:
"Properly lost? Years. But 'lost' for me isn't not-knowing-where-I-am, it's not-knowing-where-I-am-relative-to-a-spot-I-know. The second I see one thing I recognize, I'm not lost anymore even if I've never been on that exact street. One landmark and the whole net snaps back."
"Getting a bit lost is how you get the shortcuts, anyway. Every good route I have, I found it because I was lost or dodging something. You can't be given the good routes. You have to earn them by being wrong first."
[the "productive detour" theme, stated cleaner than anyone. Locals treat getting-lost as the mechanism by which the map improves. Newcomers (cf. P04) treat it as failure/threat.]
Post
- What would a good wayfinding app do for you?
"Honestly? Leave me alone but remember what I know. If it could hold my forty spots and the strings between them and just... not send me up walls. Give me my map back better, don't give me the map. I don't want the city's directions. I want mine."
Patterns I'm seeing (P07)
- Gradient is a first-class navigational input the app entirely ignores. "The map doesn't know the hills."
- He navigates a landmark graph, not a grid — ~40 known nodes + remembered "strings," spot-to-spot. Addresses are "the last ten metres."
- Landmarks are multisensory and social — smell, sound, light, the busker, school-out timing. Time-of-day is navigational data.
- "Lost" is redefined — not absence of coordinates, but absence of a known reference. One landmark re-anchors the whole network.
- Getting lost is generative — every good shortcut was earned by being wrong. Opposite valence to P04.
- He wants the app to remember HIS map, not impose THE map. Augment the local model, don't overwrite it.
[→ P07 is the expert-local pole. He's the counter-argument to turn-by-turn as a design default. Pair with P04 in [Synthesis — Wayfinding](/demo/n/synthesis-wayfinding) — they're the two ends of the same spectrum.]