UX Glossary · B
Beacon
Also: BLE beacon · iBeacon
A small Bluetooth transmitter that lets an app detect roughly where a device is indoors.
A beacon is a low-energy Bluetooth transmitter that broadcasts an identifier. Nearby phones running an app that listens for that identifier can infer they are close to it, which gives indoor positioning where GPS is unreliable.
Apple introduced the iBeacon protocol in 2013 and Google followed with Eddystone in 2015. Retail and museums were the two use cases most often promised.
Why the promise mostly did not land
The failure was rarely technical. It was that beacon experiences were built around what the business wanted to say rather than what the visitor wanted to know. A shopper walking past an aisle does not want a discount notification, and a phone buzzing on entry to a shop trains people to disable the app.
The cases that did work share a shape: the user is already looking for information, and the beacon saves them a step. Standing in front of a painting and getting that painting’s commentary is useful. Being interrupted while walking past it is not.
In practice
The design question is not “where is the user” but “what did the user come here to do”. Location is a shortcut to an answer, not a reason to speak.