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Design iterations for a location-aware event planner

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Abstract

We present the user-centered design and testing process of a mobile, location-aware event planner. Using questionnaires, interviews, and discussions with potential users, we investigated the ways individuals plan social events, such as business meetings, dinners and gatherings, and perform the attendant communication tasks. We catalogued the contextually dependent ways in which people plan their meetings and informal social events and devised a wide range of conceptual sketches to address our potential users’ professed needs. We developed a preliminary PDA-based prototype based on clear conceptual entities (people, places, locations and events) and designed to support short interaction sequences and large maps. Its evaluation with a group of nine participants provided qualitative feedback and prompted an interface redesign. This development process taught us a number of interesting lessons applicable to this category of location-aware applications, which we report at the end of the article. The set of design recommendations can assist designers in the development of location aware systems.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback and suggestions. We also thank Shannon Bauman, Jillian Hayes, Elaine Huang, and Joe Tullio for their assistance in the evaluation of the system.

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  1. College of Computing & GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280, USA

    Zachary Pousman, Giovanni Iachello, Rachel Fithian, Jehan Moghazy & John Stasko

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  1. Zachary Pousman
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  2. Giovanni Iachello
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  3. Rachel Fithian
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  4. Jehan Moghazy
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  5. John Stasko
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Correspondence to John Stasko.

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Pousman, Z., Iachello, G., Fithian, R. et al. Design iterations for a location-aware event planner. Pers Ubiquit Comput 8, 117–125 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0266-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0266-y

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