Tips from Barbara Ballard on design and development of location services

Little Springs Design is an expert in Mobile User Experience. Barbara Steven recently wrote a good piece titled location is not GPS, where she covers design and development of location services. Quoting from her essay:

So, to guide our design and development of location services, remember that:

1. Every phone is location enabled. As long as its on a proprietary network, all this data is available for at least some location finding.
2. All the available location technologies must be addressed when designing your application or service. Precision and accuracy must be understood by designers, and correctly exploited by the product.
3. If you work for a carrier, exploiting the network like this should be a snap. If not, your devices or software may or may not be able to be talk to the phone enough, and you might need to negotiate with the carrier.
4. As in many other areas of your customer’s lives, privacy concerns will continue to rise. There are actual regulations around this, but you also need to look useful without acting creepy. No one wants their app to be the next “stalker-ware.”

Related to this topic see various related essays on LBS.

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