End-user place annotation on mobile devices: a comparative study

Advances in Location-Based Services (LBS) are opening opportunities for using the location of people, places, and things to augment or streamline interaction. While computers work with physical locations like latitude and longitude directly, people usually think and speak in terms of places, which adds personal, environmental and social meaning to a location. To address this conceptual mismatch, location-aware applications must incorporate the notion of place to achieve their full potential. In this paper, we investigate four techniques for collecting end-user place annotations interactively using cell phones. The results from a usability study suggest that while all the four methods receive similar preference ratings in understandability, the "photo memo plus offline editing" method is the most favorite approach in ease of use. In addition, users indicated their desire to adopt more than one place annotation method in location-aware applications.