Location integration
2014 – 2018
Summary of various design concepts focused on enhancing applications and operating systems with location data to improve the user's day-to-day.
CONCEPTS USING LOCATION DATA
Various (concept/UX/UI)
I The challenge
Having access to someone's geolocation can reveal more information than a simple latitude/longitude. Just by adding temporal and social dimensions, behavioral patterns emerge that allow us to provide a user with more relevant information and a more personal user experience. For example, predict their next steps and offer information ahead of time, or inform them about what places or people are close by.
Unfortunately for the end user, the biggest innovation in that regard has been personalized ads, blocked content, and other dark design patterns that take data without giving anything truly meaningful in return.
The inclusion of spatial information has great potential to create a better user experience - from small quality of life enhancements to impactful user experiences.
Over the course of my time at HERE Technologies, I've sketched out many ideas of how to integrate location into existing experiences and vice versa, sometimes in teams, sometimes on my own; sometimes for projects, sometimes to document a thought.
The following slides are a selected handful of these inspirational journeys about making "location" more prominent, ubiquitous, and useful beyond navigation and personalized advertising.
II The takeaway
Browsing through the work left on the proverbial cutting room floor is a good opportunity for reflection: what has been achieved, what has been released, what should have been, what deserved to disappear forever? But looking at this unfinished business also reveals the timelessness of some of the problems we tried to solve in the space of location based services.
At the end of the day, there is a lot of “good” to be done still, and keeping a backlog of ideas, vetted or not, can prove to be useful sooner rather than later.