Here at the Center for Civic Media, we're exploring the use of smartphone apps for civic engagement. I'm really excited about using geo-fences for civic engagement; my project Action Path uses them to trigger push notifications about opportunities to participate as you walk down the street. But it's still an open question: What constitutes good uses and good design for geo-fences?
Nathan Matias and I ran a workshop on March 14, 2014 at MIT exploring this question with other students interested in using geo-fences in mobile design. The following are our notes and takeaways.
The What and Why of Geo-fences
First off, it's important to differentiate geo-fencing from geo-location and geo-awareness. Here are some definitions:
- Geo-location: identifying the real-world location of a user with GPS, Wi-Fi, and other sensors
- Geo-fencing: taking an action when a user enters or exits a geographic area
- Geo-awareness: customizing and localizing the user experience based on rough approximation of user location, often used in browsers
Since geofencing is focused on action, not all location-based mobile experiences require it. Many designs can and should avoid the messiness of using geo-fencing by relying on basic geolocation services.
Entering and exiting a geo-fence
Good, or common, uses of geo-fencing include: location tracking of objects and users, lifehacking, games (in the form of run-arounds, check-ins), and hyper-local ads and offers. Apps that are obvious employers of geo-fences include: foursquare (check-in reminders), ChildrenTracker (alerts for parents when kids are home or at school), and Field Trip (notifications about places to see around a community). However, there are some clever, non-obvious uses of geo-fences like Google Keep, which allows you to set location-based reminders for notes to self (lifehacking) and Pandora's radio app, which sends hyper-local ads to you as you walk-about, most notably McDonald's.