The importance of ‘neighbourhood’ in personalising location-based services

Location-Based Services (LBSes) provide information and functionality based on a user’s geographical location and surrounding area, yet there is currently little known about how people actually perceive their surrounding area in relation to its use by online services. With a focus on the home neighbourhood, this paper introduces an experimental platform that supports a variety of LBSes and the results of a study designed to understand how users define ‘neighbourhood’ as a geographical construct for use by online LBSes. To this end, the study analyses the suitability of five different representation methods (freeform, radius, suburb, postcode, and council area) and their frequency of use across four different LBSes (item borrowing, media mention, directory listing, and property).

Results show (1) that user-defined neighbourhoods differ greatly to the existing geographical constructs that are typically employed by LBSes like suburb, postcode, and council area (with only 22% similarity in overlap); (2) that representation methods allowing a user to self-define an area (i.e. freeform and radius) are used significantly more often by users (64% of the time) than pre-defined constructs (i.e. suburb, postcode, and council area); and (3) that many users (61%) have a dominant preference for a particular representation method that they use across multiple services. These findings are statistically significant and indicate that LBSes need to accommodate for individualised representations of neighbourhood, or face missing the next wave of personalisation in this field.