Airline E-commerce user experience experiment: An investigation of Thai LCCs passengers' purchasing behaviour among different online platforms

Purpose: This study examines the current state of the airline’s e-commerce platforms and seek to identify their benefits and disadvantages in the aspect of user experience. Design/methodology/approach: The study commenced by first reviewing the literatures on actual sale figure from the studied Thai LCC, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). It then proceeded to gather the empirical evidences using questionnaires from 135 active air passengers who have online purchasing experience. The composite findings from literature review and surveys were then used to design and apply for the final phase which is a series of in-depth interviews of air passengers on their usability test sessions and experts from the related industries. Coding and clustering was utilised to analyse the qualitative data obtained. Findings: The study examines the differences in online ticket purchasing platforms including airline's website, mobile-site and mobile application. The results identified five areas of factors: physical, trust, willingness to learn, context of use and adjustment. With regard to these factors, there are no single platform that outperform others. Airlines need to ensure that UX/UI of all platforms meet the users’ requirements in all circumstances. Originality/value: The study reveals the customer thinking processes on online purchasing behaviour. It focuses on web-usability and user experience of different booking platforms. The findings allow the subjected LCC to improve customer experience and optimise its platforms. The paper could also benefit other entrepreneurs who are in the related industry or similar contexts. In addition, the study of user-experience in the context of airline industry, particularly in the emerging countries like Thailand is limited.Peer Reviewe

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Ignore These At Your Peril: Ten principles for trust design

Online trust has been discussed for more than 10 years, yet little practical guidance has emerged that has proven to be applicable across contexts or useful in the long run. 'Trustworthy UI design guidelines' created in the late 90ies to address the then big question of online trust: how to get shoppers online, are now happily employed by people preparing phishing scams. In this paper we summarize, in practical terms, a conceptual framework for online trust we've established in 2005. Because of its abstract nature it is still useful as a lens through which to view the current big questions of the online trust debate - large focused on usable security and phishing attacks. We then deduct practical 10 rules for providing effective trust support to help practitioners and researchers of usable security

Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?

People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers

Security awareness and affective feedback:categorical behaviour vs. reported behaviour

A lack of awareness surrounding secure online behaviour can lead to end-users, and their personal details becoming vulnerable to compromise. This paper describes an ongoing research project in the field of usable security, examining the relationship between end-user-security behaviour, and the use of affective feedback to educate end-users. Part of the aforementioned research project considers the link between categorical information users reveal about themselves online, and the information users believe, or report that they have revealed online. The experimental results confirm a disparity between information revealed, and what users think they have revealed, highlighting a deficit in security awareness. Results gained in relation to the affective feedback delivered are mixed, indicating limited short-term impact. Future work seeks to perform a long-term study, with the view that positive behavioural changes may be reflected in the results as end-users become more knowledgeable about security awareness

Technology-Enhanced Teaching: A Technology Acceptance Model to Study Teachers’ Intentions to Use Digital Games in the Classroom

This research to practice paper uses a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to explore the factors that affect teachers’ intentions to use digital educational games in the classroom. Research shows that using computers and other digital technologies like digital games is one way to influence young people’s career aspirations and improve their digital literacy. This is particularly important as the world of work is changing and emerging jobs becoming more intensive in their use of digital technologies. In the developing world and in particular Nigeria, there have been calls to improve the digital literacy skills of young people to help them make informed career choices, and fully participate effectively and equally in the digital world. However, many of the computing and digital technology education initiatives have not produced the positive results intended. The lack of awareness, readiness and buy-in of the relevant stakeholders are some of the factors that has been identified as a barrier here. For example, for computing and digital technology-based projects in schools, the success largely depends on the support and attitude of teachers. As one of the major stakeholders in the classroom, teachers need to be consulted in decisions that affect the way they deliver their lessons; especially when novel ideas and approaches that challenge tradition are introduced. It is therefore important to consider their acceptance or otherwise of digital games in the classroom. A Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was modified to include constructs previously identified by teachers that potentially influence their intention to use digital games in the classroom. The extended TAM was developed into a questionnaire and tested with 220 teachers in Nigeria. Analyses of the results show that syllabus connectedness, perceived usefulness and self-efficacy are significant predictors of the intention of teachers to adoptdigital game-based learning in the classroom. Furthermore, the teachers' demographics including experience of teaching, age and gender all mediated the intention of the teachers to use digital game-based learning. The results and findings present recommendations for school leaders and developers of digital educational games. The practical insights from this are also important here and helpful for guiding the deployment of such games particularly in areas where such technological interventions have not been used before

Living City, A Collaborative Browser-Based Massively Multiplayer Online Game

This work presents the design and implementation of our Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Living City, a simulation game fully developed at the University of Messina. Living City is a persistent and real-time digital world, running in the Web browser environment and accessible from users without any client-side installation. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games attract the attention of Computer Scientists both for their architectural peculiarity and the close interconnection with the social network phenomenon. We will cover these two aspects paying particular attention to some aspects of the project: game balancing (e.g. algorithms behind time and money balancing); business logic (e.g., handling concurrency, cheating avoidance and availability) and, finally, social and psychological aspects involved in the collaboration of players, analyzing their activities and interconnections

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN