receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

Jonathan Follett is the President and Chief Creative Officer of Hot Knife Design, Inc., a Boston based UX and web collaborative. He is an internationally published author on the topics of user experience and information design and contributes regularly to web industry publications UXmatters, Digital Web and A List Apart. Jon Follett's current interests include the mobile and geospatial web. At Hot Knife, he is responsible for visual design and project management, creating web sites and applications for a variety of private (and public) sector clients – his visual design work having garnered several American Graphic Design Awards, the Horizon Interactive Award, and other industry recognition. In "The world as the interface" he shares his thoughts on the hybrid experience of interacting with on-line data in the physical world, through the mobile geospatial web.

Website: www.hotknifedesign.com/

Illustration by Andreas Schuster ...........................................................................................................................................................................

There is a world of information that we can't immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play and live. The great potential of the mobile web – whether it is delivered by smart phone, automobile navigation system, or other device – is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience. In this way, the mobile web is poised to become the delivery mechanism for a new generation of location-aware applications.

Geo-specific information will enable real connections between the digital world and the physical one, so that people can freely interact with virtual data in real spaces. An old friend from out of town is at the restaurant down the block right now; your dry cleaner is closing early due to the holiday, but he has your suit ready; and an apartment in the building you're passing by just went on the market. As location-based mobile products and services increase in popularity, all these pieces of data become immediately knowable and useable in real time.

Location-based data has the ability to not only enhance the communication, productivity, and entertainment applications for which we regularly use mobile devices, but also to create a new hybrid experience at the intersection of real and virtual worlds. This mobile geospatial web will allow the information and imagination that runs freely in cyberspace, to become increasingly available and integrated in our physical space – and with that comes both possibilities and problems.



Mapping in real time

People have always used geography as a primary organizing method for relating to the physical world – our lives are deeply affected by the environment that surrounds us. It follows, then, that the initial wave of mobile products incorporating location data are consumer-oriented mapping and navigation systems. Personal navigation systems for drivers – for example, TomTom http://www.tomtom.com and Dash http://www.dash.net – provide interactive maps and turn-by-turn audio directions for users to follow.

Of course, directing users from one place to another is just the beginning. To help drivers avoid traffic, Dash collects real time data – such as speed and location – from its users who are driving different routes, and incorporates that current information into their mapping system and timing estimates. And with the cost of gasoline giving US consumers sticker shock, TomTom has integrated fuel pricing into its mapping system, so that drivers can find the best deal when filling up their gas tanks
http://www.tomtom.com/plus/service.php?ID=24&Lid=4.


While both of these services use Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, a person or object's absolute physical location can be determined by other methods as well. Google's My Location technology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gqipmbcok provides mobile users with an approximate position based on their proximity to cell tower footprints. Also, the Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) from Skyhook Wireless uses signals from Wi-Fi base stations to determine location.


When location data is combined with the ability to search for services nearby, the result is a compelling and desirable user experience. The geospatial web can enable you to behave like a local in an unfamiliar city, or make you more informed about your current one. In a US television advertisement for the iPhone earlier this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhbaaWBgnk, mobile product innovator Apple illustrated how a person hungry for calamari could easily find a nearby seafood restaurant. For the iPhone user, there's a great difference between this location-based mobile experience and finding the restaurant via a wired connection in a hotel room. The mobile experience is immediate, spontaneous, and specific, which increases the value of the interaction.

Another extremely useful dimension of geospatial data is relative location – the relationship in physical space between two or more people, places, or objects. This type of data makes possible mobile social mapping services like Dodgeball http://www.dodgeball.com , Loopt http://www.loopt.com , and the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) location plug-in http://gallery.aim.com/detail/38 , which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. Such social mapping applications unite on-line and off-line interactions. You are no longer relating to people in your network solely in digital space, but rather through personal, real world encounters as well.

And, of course, geospatial data can be used for tracking services – to monitor packages in transit, find stolen or missing possessions, or keep track of teenage drivers.



Filtering and tagging information

Geospatial data can also serve as a powerful filter for other information – either delivering specifics or removing unnecessary options, based on a user's location. Some enterprise-level business applications already take advantage of location-based contextual data. For example, drivers for international shipping and logistics company UPS can access data related to a specific delivery address. So, if a condominium association requires a pass-code for a security gate, that code can appear alongside other information when a driver views the next address for a package delivery.

Even more powerfully, we can tag content (photos, documents, video or other media) using location data and assign it a place. Flickr, for example, enables users to upload photos tagged with location metadata, which can be viewed by others using a map interface, like mashup service Loc.alize.us http://loc.alize.us .

But it is the Yelp application for iPhone that really begins to reveal the potential of location-based services. Yelp offers user-generated reviews of restaurants, shopping, entertainment, and other businesses. The iPhone app uses the iPhone's built-in location aware feature to find your current position, allowing users to view ratings of nearby vendors. It's easy to see how the mobile experience can enable customers to bridge the on-line and off-line worlds – allowing them to access pricing, reviews, and other valuable data while, say, in a physical store examining a product. The power of on-line shopping, arguably, is the customers' ability to conduct product research and compare pricing at a variety of retailers. Conversely, with the in-store experience, customers benefit from actually being able to touch products, look them over, and assess their quality. The mobile, geospatial web can bring both of these experiences together.



The evolution of contextual data delivery

The next step for mobile user experience design will be anticipating what people need, based on where they are and what they're doing. And the most important question will become, "What do your users need to know right now?"

Mobile services can already be used to help us prepare for the unexpected. Car companies are monitoring the status of vehicles, through systems like OnStar, to send the owners reminders when the oil needs changing or when a check-up is required, or to find out if a person needs emergency assistance, say, when an airbag deployment is detected.

This idea could be applied to human health. Patients with pacemakers can already wirelessly transmit status information to their doctors for follow-up http://www.medtronic.com/carelink/patient/index.html . Whilst, for the time being, this data is strictly controlled and reviewed by the patient's doctor, we can imagine a potent combination where adding location data to this information would enable an emergency medical technician (EMT) to be alerted that someone at a nearby restaurant is showing warning signs of a heart attack or stroke.

The mobile geospatial user experience will increasingly focus on the design and delivery of the data itself, with innovation coming from the ways in which we combine, slice, and filter information. Social mapping application Dodgeball lets you list five "crushes" – people in whom you may be interested in romantically – and alerts you to their presence nearby. It's not hard to envision a location-based social application connected to your iTunes data that, in combination with other user criteria, matches you to people listening to the same music in your vicinity with whom you might have much in common, or a professional networking app that brings together potential business contacts based on their LinkedIn credentials and preferences. And just as these applications can bring you into contact with people you'd like to meet, they can, conversely, help you avoid people you'd rather not see – say, a location-based service that helps the police monitor restraining orders.



Mobile user experience design challenges

With the mobile geospatial web, we have the potential to share experiences and create opportunities in the most immediate fashion. It is the immediacy and the connection to our current environment that makes it so compelling. However, such immediacy also presents difficulties:



Privacy

Loss of privacy is the primary concern people have with social mapping and other location-based services. While many people try to build a firewall between their real lives and their anonymized on-line personalities, it will be impossible to maintain that separation should they start using location-based services; anonymity becomes thin when your cell phone tells you that you are standing three feet away from "citygirl105". Knowing someone's location is a two-way street, and if users want to reap the benefits of finding out where other people are, they will also be forced to share their own locations. People will know where you are, for better or for worse. Parents may embrace systems that track their teenage driver's location but they should be prepared for the day when that same system, which perhaps their company uses to help coordinate team members that are flying to a convention in another city, can also be used by their boss to follow their movements when they call in sick. (Did you really stay in bed all day...?).



Permission

From a marketing perspective, the mobile geospatial web has tremendous potential as a tool to match potential customers with nearby vendors. It also has the potential to be intrusive and overwhelming. We can imagine digital coupons spamming our mobile devices as we walk by shops at the mall, or vendors trying to draw us out of a competitor's location with the promise of a better deal. Of course, the immediacy of this kind of advertising might have a self-correcting component, since there would be negative effects on the vendor should they push too far.



Trust

All of these factors result in higher stakes for the mobile geospatial web. The immediacy of decision making is going to make trusted information sources extremely valuable. People on the go have less opportunity to sift through pages of search-engine results; when they pose a question, they need an answer. Information sources will need to be canny, and they will need to be correct. For example, if you make a date based on an on-line listing for a movie time, only to arrive and find that the show started 20 minutes ago, you're going to feel burned by that listing service. How many times will you make a decision based on faulty data and return to an information source? Not many.

The mobile geospatial web is an open frontier, with the potential to change our lives for the better. The hybrid experience of finding and interacting with on-line data in the physical world is compelling and useful, and the need for location-aware services is seemingly boundless. However, as with many technological improvements, the questions of privacy, trust, and permission remain open. And we must weigh these carefully if we are to successfully create geospatial mobile experiences.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Jonathan Follett