Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space

Mobile settings are not only physically and digitally mediated; they are also inhabited by people - a social space. We argue that careful design exposing the connections, gaps, overlays and mismatches within and between physical, digital and social space allow for a better understanding and thereby mastering of the resulting combined space. Two concepts are explored in MobiTip, a social mobile service for exchanging opinions among peers: intramedia seams concerning network coverage and position technology, and intermedia seams between digitally transmitted tips and the physical, social context surrounding the user. We introduce social positioning as an alternative and complement to the current strive for seamless connectedness and exact positioning in physical space

Paper Prototyping a Social Mobile Service

Methods for design and evaluation of interactive applications are not readily applicable to mobile services. By modifying an existing paper prototyping method we evaluated a mobile social service for providing user-based tips in a shopping mall. The evaluation showed that tips can be pushed to users and that they can accept that a complex user interface is presented on a small screen. Although the evaluation took place in an office environment, we received feedback on functionality of the service in the context of the shopping mall. Our evaluation indicates that simple prototyping techniques can be used for informative evaluations of mobile services that are heavily context dependent

Design of Multichannel Retailing Pet Shop

Purpose of this paper is to decide the pet shop channel combination that gives the fastest payback period or need less capital. There are 3 channels from preliminary survey. These channels are the physical store (Pet Shop), mobile store (Mobile Pet Salon) and Internet store (E-Pet). A questionnaire was developed to understand customer needs and there are more than 100 dog owners in Surabaya as the respondent, who were selected from some existing pet shops visitor. A total of 100 usable questionnaires were returned. The results are important factors for each channel, which will be a base to prepare the business development from marketing, technical, management and financial factor. Limitations of the study are minimum number of sample and a lack of theory to develop questionnaire. This paper will provides guidance for entrepreneurs who have a plan to running pet shop with multichannel retailing strategies. From all the factors, it was known that all of the combinations were feasible, but if the purpose is using minimum capital, it was better to choose Mobile Pet Salon and E-Pet, eventhough it takes longer pay back period. If the purpose is getting a minimum return period, it is better to choose Pet Shop and Mobile Pet Salon combination, with higher capital needed and shorter discounted pay back

Kiosks 21: a new role for information kiosks?

Discusses and analyses the latest generation of information kiosks, Kiosks 21, which features information provision/promotion, interaction, transaction and relationships. In contrast to their task based predecessors, these kiosks focus on customer service delivery to ‘customers in context’. Five case studies of such kiosks located respectively in an airport, railway station, car rental base, hotel lobby, and shopping mall are analysed to demonstrate the way in which the kiosks are implemented to meet the differing requirements of customers in different contexts. Case studies are analysed in terms of kiosk design and location, user profile, information architecture, interface design, communication, and commerce. A range of areas for research and development are proposed.</p

Realising context-sensitive mobile messaging

Mobile technologies aim to assist people as they move from place to place going about their daily work and social routines. Established and very popular mobile technologies include short-text messages and multimedia messages with newer growing technologies including Bluetooth mobile data transfer protocols and mobile web access.Here we present new work which combines all of the above technologies to fulfil some of the predictions for future context aware messaging. We present a context sensitive mobile messaging system which derives context in the form of physical locations through location sensing and the co-location of people through Bluetooth familiarity

How Design Plays Strategic Roles in Internet Service Innovation: Lessons from Korean Companies

In order to survive in the highly competitive internet business, companies have to provide differentiated services that can satisfy the rapidly changing users’ tastes and needs. Designers have been increasingly committed to achieving user satisfaction by generating and visualizing innovative solutions in new internet service development. The roles of internet service design have expanded from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a more strategic aspect. This paper investigates the methods of managing design in order to enhance companies’ competitiveness in internet business. The main research processes are to: (1) explore the current state of internet service design in Korea through in-depth interviews with professional designers and survey questionnaires to 30 digital design agencies and 60 clients; (2) compare how design is managed between in-house design groups and digital design agencies though the case studies of five Korean companies; and (3) develop a taxonomy characterizing four roles of designers in conjunction with the levels of their strategic contributions to internet service innovation: visualist, solution provider, concept generator, and service initiator. In addition, we demonstrate the growing contributions of the strategic use of design for innovating internet services, building robust brand equity, and increasing business performance. Keywords: Design Management; Internet Business; Internet Service Design; Digital Design; Digital Design Agency; In-House Design Group, Case Study</p

Analyzing web behavior in indoor retail spaces

We analyze 18- million rows of Wi-Fi access logs collected over a 1-year period from over 120,000 anonymized users at an inner city shopping mall. The anonymized data set gathered from an opt-in system provides users&#039; approximate physical location as well as web browsing and some search history. Such data provide a unique opportunity to analyze the interaction between people&#039;s behavior in physical retail spaces and their web behavior, serving as a proxy to their information needs. We found that (a) there is a weekly periodicity in users&#039; visits to the mall; (b) people tend to visit similar mall locations and web content during their repeated visits to the mall; (c) around 60% of registered Wi-Fi users actively browse the web, and around 10% of them use Wi-Fi for accessing web search engines; (d) people are likely to spend a relatively constant amount of time browsing the web while the duration of their visit may vary; (e) the physical spatial context has a small, but significant, influence on the web content that indoor users browse; and (f) accompanying users tend to access resources from the same web domains