User Expectations and Preferences regarding Location-based Services -- Results of a Survey

How should Location Based Services (LBS) look like? What should they offer and in which form? This paper aims at answering some of these kinds of questions by presenting the results of a detailed survey recently undertaken in Heidelberg, Germany. A general section covers questions about the acceptance of different content types and services on mobile devices. Furthermore the preferences of various users for different communication channels and the willingness to pay for such services were investigated. Another section is dealing with special issues of – LBS, like questions about the users’ behavior and its implications with respect to adaptive maps (e.g. alignment of the map) and proactive location-based tips (e.g. what actually means “Near” to users in what situation). The survey focuses on two specific user groups: pupils and students. As learned from SMS one can assume that these will be early adopters of such services. Our results provide a base to tailor services on mobile devices to the real needs of the users. But in particular in the area of adaptive mobile maps there are still a lot of open questions (Zipf 2003as) left for further studies. In particular there is a lack of mathematical quantifications of these results necessary for a formal model to be included in context adaptive map generating software as presented in (Zipf 2003b).