Why Location-Based Apps Suck
There’s a certain amount of irony in the title of this WhereCamp PDX session. At a conference focused on location-based technology, everyone is enthusiastic about ways to apply location. It’s this technophilia that makes us want to make it better, because we’re a long way away from the perfect user experience.
Declaring your location is a mostly manual process at this point. The interface is awkward out of necessity. For most cases it requires typing the address, or looking up a business. It’s either easy and inaccurate or difficult and takes too long.
At the same time, our cell phones already know where we are. Whether it’s cell tower triangulation or GPS, we’re “phoning home” to our wireless providers. This data is not available, for obvious privacy reasons. But shouldn’t my own information be available to me, if I say so? Can I also decide who else to share it with, including services I trust? Examples like this really show how open the web could be.
Even with access to the data, the quality is sometimes questionable. Certainly with cell tower triangulation, the granularity can only be so good. But even GPS has its errors, especially for tracking trails and and routes. The accuracy just isn’t good enough.
Finally, the way we display the data we do have is also error prone. The quality of GPS maps is spotty and the content is kept under lock and key. Correcting mistakes on maps is difficult or impossible.
The shortcomings of location-based apps leave a lot of room for improvement. The pieces of extremely useful technology already exist. We’re just starting to be able to put them together.
