ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Eija Kaasinen
User needs for location-aware mobile services
Received: 1 August 2002 / Accepted: 15 November 2002

Springer-Verlag London Limited 2003
Abstract Mobile contexts of use vary a lot, and may
even be continuously changing during use. The context
is much more than location, but its other elements are
still difficult to identify or measure. Location informa-
tion is becoming an integral part of different mobile
devices. Current mobile services can be enhanced with
location-aware features, thus providing the user with a
smooth transition towards context-aware services. Po-
tential application fields can be found in areas such as
travel information, shopping, entertainment, event in-
formation and different mobile professions. This paper
studies location-aware mobile services from the user’s
point of view. The paper draws conclusions about key
issues related to user needs, based on user interviews,
laboratory and field evaluations with users, and expert
evaluations of location-aware services. The user needs
are presented under five main themes: topical and
comprehensive contents, smooth user interaction,
personal and user-generated contents, seamless service
entities and privacy issues.
Keywords Location-aware services Æ Mobile services Æ
Usability Æ User evaluation Æ User needs
1 Introduction
In mobile environments, all the elements of the context
of use may vary a lot. Users are different and they may
use the services for many different tasks, even for tasks
that were not anticipated in the design. The variety of
mobile devices is growing and the users expect to be able
to use the same or the same kind of services on the
different devices. The technical and service infrastructure
may differ and they may even change in the middle of a
usage session, e.g. the network or the positioning system
may change when the user moves from one place to
another. Similarly, the service infrastructure, i.e. the
available services and applications, may change. The
physical context may vary a lot in terms of illumination,
background noise, temperature and weather. The use of
the device may affect the social situation in which the
user finds him/herself or the social situation may affect
the way the user uses the system.
An efficient way of improving the usability of mobile
services and applications is to adapt the contents and
presentation of the service to each individual user and
his/her current context of use. In this way, the amount of
user interaction will be minimised: the user has quick
access to the information or service that (s)he needs in
his/her current context of use. The information can even
be provided to the user automatically.
A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide
relevant information and/or services to the user, where
relevancy depends on the user’s task [1]. The main
problem with context adaptation is that the context
cannot be easily identified or measured. The location of
the user is an element of the context that currently can
be measured more or less accurately depending on the
positioning system in use. In this paper, location-aware
services are defined as context-aware services that utilise
the location of the user to adapt the service accordingly.
Location-based services are services that are related as
such or by their information contents to certain places or
locations. Thus location-aware services are a special case
of location-based services.
So far, context-awareness has mainly been studied
from the technical point of view and the studies have
concentrated on location. Different experimental
systems have been set up but only a few user evaluation
results from small-scale trials are available. Location-
aware services are a concrete step towards context-
awareness. Other aspects of context-awareness will
follow as soon as the corresponding elements of the
context, such as weather or the social situation, can be
measured and the adaptivity needs can be identified.
Pers Ubiquit Comput (2003) 7: 70–79
DOI 10.1007/s00779-002-0214-7
Eija Kaasinen
VTT Information Technology,
P.O. Box 1206,
FIN-33101 Tampere, Finland
e-mail: eija.kaasinen@vtt.fi

This paper studies location-aware mobile services from
the user’s point of view. The paper draws conclusions
about key issues related to user needs, based on user
interviews, laboratory and field evaluations with users,
and expert evaluations of location-aware services.
2 Methods of locating the user
From the point of view of the service, the simplest
method of locating the user is to let him/her tell the
location. From the point of view of the user, this method
requires extra effort because the user needs to define his/
her location and input it to the system as a part of the
search.
The user can be located with different positioning
systems. If the user device includes a GPS (Global Po-
sitioning System) module, the user’s location can be
defined very accurately (2–20 meters). A GPS cannot be
used indoors and it may not work in ‘urban canyons’
either. The location is calculated in the user device and
it has to be sent to the service provider in order to
get location-aware services. The range of commercial
products currently available include mobile phones with
integrated GPS modules, separate GPS modules for
PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), and GPS devices
with integrated mobile phone and data features.
A mobile phone can be located by the telecom op-
erator in the network. The positioning is based on
identifying the mobile network cell in which the phone is
located, or on measuring distances to overlapping cells.
In urban areas the accuracy can be down to 50 meters,
whereas in rural areas the accuracy may be several
kilometres. The advantage of the cell-based positioning
method is that the user needs no extra equipment - an
ordinary mobile phone will do. If the user wants to use
location-aware services from other service providers, the
location has to be transferred to the other service pro-
vider and the telecom operator must get permission for
this from the user. The location data is possessed by the
telecom operator, which may not be willing to pass it on
free of charge. Possibly because of these data transaction
needs, current cell-location-based services are provided
mainly by telecom operators.
The user can also be identified at a service point,
utilising e.g. WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network),
Bluetooth
TM
or infrared technologies. These kinds of
proximity positioning systems require a dense network
of access points. The density of the network depends
both on the required location accuracy and on the range
of the access points. The accuracy can be down to 2
meters. The user needs special equipment, although
WLAN and Bluetooth, for instance, are becoming in-
creasingly common in current mobile devices. Because of
the required infrastructure, such systems can only be
used in a predefined area, e.g. a shopping centre, an
exhibition area or an office building. The location of the
user is available only when the user is in the service area.
3 Recent research on context- and
location-aware services
Context-awareness can be implemented as an adaptation
of the user interface or the contents of the service. Ser-
vices can also be invoked based on the identified context.
A context-aware user interface can select the appro-
priate modes for service interaction. A context-aware
user interface can also be implemented e.g., as context-
aware text prediction [2] or a location-aware remote
control for the environment [3]. A major challenge for
the context-aware user interface is that the context may
be continuously changing. This raises the problem of
integrating changes into the user interface in such a way
that the user remains in control [4]. Moving can also be
seen as one mode of interaction with the system. This
interaction mode is quite challenging because it is diffi-
cult to know the user’s intention: is the moving really
taking place in order to interact with the system [5].
In recent research, context-aware contents have been
studied in different application areas, e.g. tourist guid-
ance [6], exhibition guidance [7], e-mail [8], shopping [9],
mobile network administration, medical care and office
visitor information [10]. In these studies, the location of
the user is the main attribute used in the context-adap-
tation. In well-defined application areas, it is possible to
predict the other elements of the context according to
the location of the user. Designing for more general user
groups and wider contexts of use will be much more
challenging.
4 The empirical studies
4.1 Scenario evaluations
We have carried out several empirical studies to study
user attitudes, needs and preferences for location-aware
services. We started with scenario evaluations in group
interviews. The aim of this evaluation was to study
broadly the attitudes of the potential users towards
different personal navigation services. Future possibili-
ties of personal navigation products and services were
presented to the interviewees as pictured scenarios
of everyday life. In addition to location-based services,
the scenarios also introduced route guidance services,
services for tracking property and services based on
locating other people.
We had 13 evaluation groups, each with 3 to 7 peo-
ple, totalling 55 persons of different ages, different
backgrounds and from different parts of Finland
(Table 1). The groups were selected so that they broadly
represented the potential users of personal navigation
services. The groups included four families, three hobby
groups (football players, boaters and hunters), two
youth groups, senior citizens, a group of motor-disabled
people, a group of visually impaired people and students
of well-being technology. The groups were somewhat
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