Kaasinen, E. User needs for location-aware mobile services. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. volume 7, number 1, pp. 70-79. 2003. [PDF]

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This paper present a qualitative study of mobile services that could be enhanced with location-aware features thus providing the user’s point of view. The authors conducted interviews with 13 evaluation groups with a total of 55 persons of different ages, genders, ans socio-economic status. To guide the interactions, they provided participants with structured scenarios and prototypes that they had to test. Also, they conducted interviews with experts during a conference.

The paper draws conclusion about key issues related to users’ needs. Topical information, the kind of information that might change while the user is on the mobe, turned out to be important to the user (e.g., weather forecast, train schedule). They also identified the push vs pull modality of delivery information to the user as being one of the possible issued with designing these kind of services. Users declared the need of having detailed search options, the ability of personalizing the interaction with the service and that of contributing to the system providing data. Also, they discussed the need of giving the ability to the user to override the recommendations of the system (e.g., exporatory search). Privacy was also mentioned.