W3 Usability, Utility and Ethics of Location Based Services

Teija Vainio, Virpi Anttila & Eija Kaasinen
University of Tampere; VTT

Designing and using location-based services involve complex issues from usability and ethical point of view. For example, what is the best way to inform the user of being located by a system and how to control the location function or how should a user be informed before he or she could be located?

The aim of the workshop is to bring together user experiences of location based services related to usability, utility or ethical issues. Examining usability, utility and ethical issues will provide designers, computer scientists, and researchers an opportunity to better understand the relationship of these issues to HCI.

In this workshop experiences in designing, developing and evaluating products or services based on locating other people will be discussed. The half-day workshop will include short presentations highlighting usability and ethical issues in this application field. The main part of the workshop will be teamwork sessions, where the participants together comment on scenarios that describe how locating other people could be utilised and how location based services should be designed in different everyday situations.

Web page: http://www.uta.fi/hyper/projektit/ken/