Digital face of the city : Application of NFC in contextualized and personalized data access to urban environment

Abstract: Near Field Communication (NFC) approach may be seen as a perspective way to improve user experience of quick data access with mobile devices to various services (secure payments, information exchange between users, etc.) in a city. This thesis concerns the topic of challenges which may be faced by interaction designers using this approach for creating a context-aware mobile solution for personalized data access in service-intensive urban environments. This research is based on considerations from researches, which explored which mobile information needs in particular seemed to be relevant for a modern user. Moreover, affordances and design blends concept are discussed in this work through a prism of the human-computer interaction in a city. ‘Research through design’ concept allowed performing the investigation of the given problem, starting from a user research, followed by prototyping an alternative solution and after - user evaluation of the prototype. Finally, a critical overview of the performed research gives suggestions for further improvement of the project.