Understanding the user experience of location-based services: five principles of perceptual organisation applied

Within recent years, the development of location-based services have received increasing attention from the software industry as well as from researchers within a wide range of computing disciplines as a particular interesting class of context-aware mobile systems. However, while a lot of research has been done into sensing, adapting to, and philosophising over the complex concept of ‘context’, little theoretically based knowledge exists about why, from a user experience perspective, some system designs work well and why others do not. Contributing to this discussion, this article suggests the perspective of ‘Gestalt theory’ as a theoretical framework for understanding the use of this class of computer systems. Based on findings from an empirical study, we argue that the user experience of location-based services can be understood through Gestalt theory's five principles of perceptual organisation: proximity, closure, symmetry, continuity and similarity. Specifically, we argue, that these principles assist us in explaining the interplay between context and technology in the user experience of location-based services, and how people make sense of small and fragmented pieces of information on mobile devices in context.