Drawing From a Larger Canvas - a Gestalt Perspective on Location-Based Services

Location-based services (LBS) provide mobile users with information and functionality tailored to their geographical location. Within recent years these kinds of mobile information systems have received increasing attention from the software industry as well as from researchers within a wide range of disciplines concerned with the development and use of computer technology. This paper presents a user study of a prototype locationbased service providing an informational overlay to the civic space of Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia. In analysing our field data, we reintroduce the perspective of “gestalt theory”, and argue that describing people’s use of location-based services through gestalt theory’s principles of proximity, closure, symmetry, continuity, and similarity can help explain how people make sense of small and fragmented pieces of information on mobile information systems in context.

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