Investigating the relationship between spatial skills and web mapping application performance among university students

Successfully performing a task using a web mapping application may not only depend on the application itself and how well it meets users' needs but also on users' spatial skills. Spatial ability is comprised of different spatial skills and high performance in one skill does not entail similar performance in another. Hence, we explored how university students' performance in seven spatial skills (three small- and four large-scale skills) affects their performance in four tasks (such as finding the closest point of interest or finding the shortest path) using Google Maps, considering three groups of participants based on high, medium, and low spatial skills performance. Beyond exploring this relation for each spatial skill separately, we introduce a composite index for performance in spatial skills, considering them as either two separate clusters of small- and large-scale skills or as an amalgam of both. Results indicate that participants with higher small-scale, but not with higher large-scale, spatial skills, when these are separately assessed, perform better on Google Maps than the other two groups, especially the low spatial-skilled group. This also holds when small-scale skills are considered as a cluster and when all skills are considered as a whole.