Building Applications to Establish Location Awareness

Abstract

An emerging challenge in the design of interfaces for mobile devices is the appropriate use of information about the location of the user. This chapter considers tradeoffs in privacy, computing power, memory capacity, and wireless signal availability that accompany the obtaining and use of location information and other contextual information in the design of interfaces. The increasing ability to integrate location knowledge in our mobile, ubiquitous applications and their accompanying tradeoffs requires that we consider their impact on the development of user interfaces, leading to an agile usability approach to design borne from agile software development and usability engineering. The chapter concludes with three development efforts that make use of location knowledge in mobile interfaces.