Small Interface Choices Decide Who Finishes a Campus TourSmall Interface Choices Decide Who Finishes a Campus Tour

A virtual tour that shows every arrow at once trusts the visitor to plan a route. Beginners cannot do that yet, because they do not know what the building contains. The paper frames this as a working memory problem: people who are busy deciding where to go stop encoding the place itself.

• Reveal arrows one at a time. The path is fixed, so a visitor always has exactly one next step to consider.
• Make the visitor earn the next arrow. It appears only after they open the information panel of the room they are standing in, which keeps them searching rather than watching.
• Colour the arrows by memory. White means a room not yet seen, blue means one already visited, so the tour shows progress without a separate map.

Guidance and learning are often treated as a trade off. Give people a guide and they finish quickly but learn less. This study tested that assumption directly, and the trade off did not appear. The guided group finished sooner and scored the same on the landmark knowledge test.

The reason seems to be the middle bullet. The guide does not do the work for the visitor. It removes the route planning load and leaves the looking, reading and clicking in place, which is exactly the part that builds memory.

The experiment used 360 degree photo tours of 19 rooms, so the same recipe should transfer to museums, hospitals, hotels and plant walkthroughs. Anywhere a first time visitor has to find every stop without prior knowledge, a sequential guide with a visible sense of progress is a cheap addition to build and an easy one to test.