Latent Needs for Location Services
“So…what does a London cabbie know about London that your sat nav doesn’t?”
— Interview question
This is a foundational ethnographic research project I lead early in my career at Intel. This project took place about 18 months before the release of the first iPhone, a time at which almost no one in the mobile phone industry understood the potential of location capabilities in cellphones outside of navigation. To help him make some technology portfolio investment decisions, the GM of the cell phone components group asked my team to conduct some foundational research to understand the scope of future uses of location technology on cellphones.
01 Background and Goals
In the mid-2000s, GPS was a technology in search of an end use beyond navigation and directions. Navigation and lost phone tracking apps were starting to be pre-installed in phones, but beyond this the industry was at a loss for what future uses we would see. My team’s task was to understand the latent needs for locational information among smartphone users. Optimally, we also wanted to understand how future use cases might drive additional requirements for location capabilities.
02 Methods
Phase 1 - To understand the motivations consumers had to use GPS to solve latent needs, we sought out lead users in markets where a greater variety of location apps were starting to become available…Japan and the UK. There we used conextual inquiry methods to understand how these apps were being used in situ. Having started their “journey” of applying GPS to solve real-world problems beyond wayfinding (eg exercise monitoring, child tracking, trip planning), these users were excellent sources of insight as to both their underlying motivations as well as gaps in what the current technology could provide.
Phase 2 - After having conducted field research and compiling our insights, we engaged with Institute for the Future whose labs were prototyping “Artifacts from the Future” using existing handheld PCs with bolted-on GPS devices. Using these speculative design prototypes we “experienced” future applications like location-based advertising, location aware gaming, travel apps etc.
03 Insights
As often happens in research, our btreakthrough moment happened in one single thread of inquiry in our discussion guide…when we asked “what does a London cabbie know about London that your sat nav doesn’t?” This opened up the entire realm of discussion contextual knowledge about a place…is this a safe neighbothood? Where is the best sushi around here? What clubs around here are popular? Our own epiphany was that this was all knowledge that was available..somewhere…on the internet but at that time was not easily consumable on the phone in a mobile context. Also, the “speculative prototyping” we participated in started to make clear some of the future requirements we needed to drill down on further, from location accuracy and reliability to the need to support future advertising ecosystems.
04 Actionability
Despite what we thought was a well-developed case for the bright future of mobile location services, the GM we were reporting to initially was very skeptical based on feedback he was getting from his own customers…cellphone manufacturers and mobile carriers. However, when the iPhone was released, about 40% off the apps at launch used GPS, and we were almost immediately brought back in to propose a much broader program of user research and technology development. Eventually this lead to the development of low-power chipsets and an SDK for the continuous processing of sensor data (GPS, accelerometers etc), which Intel released almost 2 years before competing chips from Samsung and Apple…and for which I was the UX Lead on the core development team.
05 My Learnings
When your findings suggest a paradigm shift in future user behavior, expect pushback.
In a corporate context you need to understand the current value chain that your product exists in. Prior to the iPhone release, there were no real app stores, so cellular carriers produced most software offered on their phones. So in a way Apple had to tear down that model to unleash the latent innovation around location apps.
If possible, include management in the process that leads up to your final recopmmendations. After this project I upped my efforts to include senior stakeholders in workshops and even some fieldwork.
Dont give up. If they dont believe your findings at first, when events point to the validity of your research, they’ll usually come calling again for help eventually.