Design and development guidelines for real-time, geospatial mobile applications: Lessons from 'MarineTraffic'

Abstract

The development of real-time, geospatial mobile applications poses particular challenges regarding their interaction design and technical implementation. In this paper, we present insights into the design and development of the mobile version of MarineTraffic (marinetraffic.com), which is an open, community-based project that provides real-time geospatial information about vessel movements and port traffic. During the technical development and deployment of MarineTraffic mobile, we identified a number of 8 principles and 25 guidelines that had to be followed in order to improve the user experience and tackle technical issues. We discuss these guidelines with respect to implementation examples and experiences from the specific mobile applications and we suggest that these guidelines have to be kept in mind for the design and development of similar mobile applications. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.