Design Pattern of the Week: Location Selection

This post is part of a series on mobile user interface design patterns, excerpted from Designing the Mobile User Experience, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. This second set of patterns will address screen design for mobile applications.

The past two weeks we've looked at two approaches to laying out screens: table-based. List-based layout is usually the correct approach for mobile, as contrasted with the table-based approach (or similar CSS approaches) used on the desktop.

This week we start on a series of patterns for screen design in specific situations. The first is a generic approach to getting a location.

A generic interface to obtain, save, and manage the user's location across a variety of applications and device capabilities.

Design

When needing user location, provide a screen that enables a number of methods to set it, not just automatic location or postal code entry. As illustrated in Figure 6.3, the complete set includes:

• Home, which can be the user's postal code entered during registration or can be empty until first used. Provide a "Change" page for the rare case when the user's home region changes. May not be useful for travel applications.
• Favorites, which should be an automatically generated list of locations, with the most frequently used locations at the top of the list. Especially useful when use is likely to center around known locations; may even be useful for travel applications.
• Find Me, which activates the device's location fetching API. Do not include if automatic location detection is not supported.
• Elsewhere, allowing the user to enter postal code, city, or address. When necessary, take the user to a disambiguation page to clarify input. Do not require the user to enter any more than necessary.
• Name location, applied to any "Find Me" or "Elsewhere" location specified.

The screen also needs "Save" and "Cancel" softkeys, buttons, or links.

Applicable Devices and Platforms

All mobile devices and applications.

When Used

Use when location is needed at discrete, infrequent points in time. For applications that need frequent or continuous updates, rely on automatic location only.

Rationale

Devices, and plans, have varying ability to use location services on the phone. Indeed, some users may have location turned off due to privacy concerns. This should not prevent many location-enabled applications to be useful on all devices.

This design gives the user a variety of methods for entering location data, and saves data for further use without getting in the user's way.

Choosing location is something that is definitely difficult to make intuitive. In this case, I think that “Find Me” should go first, when available, as, if people are using their mobile phone to get at location based info, it’s likely not from their home. Anyway, thanks for the well thought out pattern!

I absolutely agree … for some applications. The chief example is directions.

In other cases, favorite locations are better. These are largely planning-type tasks: what restaurants are near the show we just bought tickets for?

Either way, it illustrates the need to apply patterns with intelligence.

Thanks for that nice feedback eric.