Mobile design: Bookmarking the moment

7 November 2006 by Rod McLaren

Imagine being able to set a “bookmark” on a mobile device that is both timestamped and geocoded. This might be useful in hands-and-eyes-busy situations: field users could press a button to set a time-and-place marker, indicating that something important happened at that moment.

The field user would invoke it in situations where:

1. it’s important to accurately capture the time and place of the event, but…
2. the moment doesn’t give the user time to fill in any detail, or it needs to be done unobtrusively.

Later, when time and their context allows, the field user can come back to their bookmarks, and fill in the detail. And in applications where there’s a control centre, call centre or other central management watching the activity in real-time, the field user might be phoned up so that they can quickly dictate the detail.

This may be particularly relevant for transport-related applications (where users are often hands/eyes-busy), policing scenarios, or in any scenario where there are specific regulatory or compliance requirements around the capture of data accurately, eg policing.

The images here suggest what it might look like in a policing scenario: the officer sees a Road Traffic Accident, records a bookmark, and later fills in the detail.

51st Carnival of the Mobilists at Tarek Speaks Mobile Design principles for public sector and enterprise mobile applications