How to look beyond what users say that they want

This paper shares our experience with a strategic design project for defining the key user experience scenarios for utilizing location information available on mobile devices. While the domain area has been known both in industry and academia alike for many years, our stakeholders wanted to know what would be most appealing user experiences in the coming years, particularly beyond what is expected and available in the market right now. Therefore gaining confidence in understanding user needs and desires was considered crucial in the project. We pursued two main tracks of design research activities to bring insights on the current users' perceptions, needs and wants (contextual interviews) as well as implicit wishes and aspirations (exploration probes and creative workshop) we should fulfill when designing location aware solutions. We describe our rationales of how we designed the design research process, and compare the results of the two tracks.