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Mobile navigation services are becoming more than merely digital maps, many of them including imagery from the street level. The user can benefit from enriching the 2D-map-based navigation with panoramic imagery from the citizen’s perspective, hence gaining an authentic view into the frequent landmarks that urban environments include. In this paper we describe the user-centered design of a mobile street-imagery-based navigation service with a wide range of features supporting navigation and exploration of unfamiliar cities. We evaluate the final version with a field trial. In the evaluation the participants used the service freely for the navigation tasks that were relevant to them during the trial period. The method shed light on issues that have not been raised by previous studies on image-based navigation, that which have relied on more formal test tasks. It confirmed that the images are useful in navigation but it highlighted that other methods are usually faster and reliable enough to suffice in most cases.