Understanding user engagement with barcoded signs in the 'Coast' location-based experience

This article describes experiences with an application in which users read barcoded signs with camera phones to obtain content about their surroundings at seaside locations. The application was made available to the general public in support of 'Coast', a BBC television series about the UK coastline. The article highlights lessons from that trial in terms of what worked well and what was subject to deployment constraints. In particular, it describes how several factors affected the users' engagement with the signs, the places, and other users: the barcode and mobile phone technologies; semantic issues such as signs' relationships to landmarks; and practical issues such as local regulations.