Location awareness can help facilitate a rendezvous of two or more persons. To further enhance the rendezvous experience,
we conducted two complementary field studies to identify
what information in a location-aware map application is important to rendezvous individuals (study 1) and to explore the use of
autofocus, our automation technique to reduce user interactions with the rendezvous application while still providing relevant information
to assist users with their navigation task (study 2). Overall, our results highlight the importance of maintaining the visibility
of the user’s location in relation to that of their partner(s) and rendezvous location. Additionally, we show that automation
is useful in the context of a rendezvous application, but that the considerations are significantly more nuanced than originally
conceived. We discuss unique instances
when and
why the automation process broke-down or did not perform as required by users. The results of this work demonstrate the potential
for automation in a location-aware rendezvous application and identify important design considerations for future work in
this area.
Keywords Location awareness - Rendezvous - Map interaction - Automation - Field study - Autofocus