Thought of this one a while ago. Some of my thoughts:
- How will you know where I am? It would be expensive to run my phone's GPS continuously to figure this out.
- My car might not be immediately available. The time it takes to get to the car will have little or nothing to do with my GPS distance from it.
- Parking can take a significant amount of time.
- Traffic estimates are often wrong, sometimes greatly underestimating travel time. Being late is much worse than being early, but this is appointment dependent.
- We try to only run GPS when your next calendar event is coming up.
- Right now we have an application-wide setting that says, "Add X minutes to my travel time." We're hoping people will use that to accommodate the fact that they have to walk to their car, find parking, etc. Eventually we'll make this configurable for each event.
- Yeah, traffic estimates aren't 100% accurate, but they're better than crossing your fingers and hopping in the car. :)
We try to only run GPS when your next calendar event is coming up.
That could be a problem. Perhaps you want to run it near the last appointment? This is a complicated problem.
Right now we have an application-wide setting that says, "Add X minutes to my travel time." We're hoping people will use that to accommodate the fact that they have to walk to their car, find parking, etc. Eventually we'll make this configurable for each event.
Some things are better done earlier than later. In "new development" cities, this is okay, but in more complicated locations it will be a serious per-appointment issue. In a time when people say the first mover advantage is an illusion, getting ahead of the UX game could mean everything.
Yeah, traffic estimates aren't 100% accurate, but they're better than crossing your fingers and hopping in the car.
- How will you know where I am? It would be expensive to run my phone's GPS continuously to figure this out.
- My car might not be immediately available. The time it takes to get to the car will have little or nothing to do with my GPS distance from it.
- Parking can take a significant amount of time.
- Traffic estimates are often wrong, sometimes greatly underestimating travel time. Being late is much worse than being early, but this is appointment dependent.
Looking forward to more details!