Leveraging Presence in the Design of Mobile Services: Challenges, Opportunities, and Value Creation

Recent industry white papers explore presence as one of the hottest, most valuable design trends for mobile services that has only recently been leveraged in designing mobile services. Building on this viewpoint and drawing on prior communication research, we show that presence is a much richer construct than these white papers suggest, and we more fully explore the application of three types of presence physical presence, social presence, and self-presence to mobile services design and to the corresponding opportunities for value creation. We present a series of design challenges to incorporating presence and develop the opportunities for overcoming these challenges. The implications of designing with presence are 1) a greater awareness of and response to the users’ needs and behaviors; 2) strategies for top-down design that leverages this awareness; and 3) methods for integrating unique features of mobile devices based on user and environment-driven factors rather than technology-driven factors. Numerous real-world examples illustrate both the complete nature of presence and its application to mobile services.