User Centric LBS

Interesting post on LSB:

"That said, there seems to be a conspicuous lack of user-centered design in location-based services. User’s context is often not taken into account, and designers frenziness to push for automatic positioning or complex features often leads to poor scenarios as Russell pointed out some time ago. What is missing is not the technology, of course there are lots of clever positionning techniques (GPS/WiFi triangulation/RFIDs/TV waves…) but rather a scenario that fits to users’ needs and their context.

This is the reason why I put the emphasis on the idea that location matters but designers should keep in mind that automatic positioning is just sharing information whereas self-declared positioning is both an information and a communication act.

They found that letting users manually reveal their positions was also good way to get rid of location awareness discrepancies (due to unreliable network, latency, bandwidth, security, unstable topology, or network homogeneity)."