Effect of Location-Awareness on Rendezvous Behavior

Effect of Location-Awareness on Rendezvous Behaviour by David Dearman, Kirstie Hawkey, Kori Inkpen, Dalhousie University, Canada. Short paper at CHI 2005.

This paper presents an exploratory field study investigating the behavioral effects of mobile location-aware computing on rendezvousing. Pariticipants took part in one of the three technology conditions: mobile phone condition, location-aware handeld condition and mobile phone and location-aware handheld condition. Data was collected via field notes, audio recording, data logging, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. The results of this study clearly demonstrates that the participants exhibited very different behaviors depending on the technology used. Interesting to me is the location-aware handled condition in which half of the participants chose to leave the rendezvous location to attempt to meet their partners:

Participants who chose to leave seemed confused about their partner’s actions or believed they were lost. [...] it was very disconcerting to the waiting partner because they did not have enough contextual information to determine what the problem was. This uncertainty was strong enough in some cases to actually draw the waiting partner away from the rendezvous location.

Uncertainty raising from the lack of contextual information is something that should also appear in our CatchBob! experiments. Location is difficult to convey accurately through dialogue, resulting in ambiguity and misunderstandings. Automating location-awareness raises other issues, because contextual information are not often conveyed by positioning systems. Users must deduct the context which can lead to increased mental load (to be proven), confusion and frustration.