New mobile service development process

Mobile applications play an ever growing role in everybody’s life around our globe and the leading app stores currently offer more than 2 million different apps each for their users. It is well accepted that the usage context is much more important in the UI and UX design of these apps than when designing desktop applications. It is important to realize that a lot of these apps are part of a mobile service that defines their usage context and the UX of the mobile app is not only determined by the interaction with it but by the value creation of the whole service. We therefore propose in this paper a joint service and app design process that not only optimizes the user interaction with the mobile app but also the UX of the whole service in order to provide an optimal value proposition to the service customer of the mobile service

Strategies of Mobile Virtual Network Operators in the Southeast Europe Region

MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) are companies that function as mobile operators but do not have their own frequency spectrum allocation or the necessary network infrastructure. Those companies make business arrangements with one or more licensed Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) by leasing from them the access to mobile network and capacities. Such business concept enables the MVNOs to participate in the mobile communications market, thus extending the value chain and providing innovative mobile communication services specifically adapted to target segments. MVNOs have significant share on the mobile market in Europe and make influence on customers of mobile services in the meaning of change a telecom company and develop the new competitive strategies. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and predict the growth strategies of the MVNOs into the South-eastern Europe markets (SEE). Findings of comparative analysis have based on the research of secondary sources, practice of EU countries with licensed MNOs and MVNOs and on our expert opinion. Findings indicate that MVNOs which are financially strong have used service development strategy on the present market, while companies which operate in mobile telephony as a core business have chosen market development strategy. Strategy of diversification is the most applicable for companies which have a background and its core business within fixed and Internet and have added mobile telephony services to its portfolio. Strategy of expansion on the present market in combined with present services is not frequent on MVNO market. As an alternative growth strategy, MVNOs in SEE countries will apply a diversification strategy that implies parallel development of new services and new markets with the aim of expansion. The major motive for applying the diversification strategy can be a relatively small existing customer base and a new market entry. Appearance of MVNOs on the SEE market will be in form of partnership strategy with existing MNO as a form of international contracting cooperation. Pan-European global MVNO will change the industry of mobile market which will be driven by market forces, technological evolution and it will present an example of creative process destruction.MVNO, growth strategies, entry strategies, foreign market, mobile communications

Mobile Service Experience -­ a quantitative study

Incorporating Mobile service experiences into service design bring new challenges to service innovation and entails a consciousness of service specific characteristics in the mobile context. This is more relevant if we have in mind that these are customer – journeys with self-service situations. This paper presents the results of a quantitative study of mobile service experience. This quantitative study was based on a survey with users of a new mobile service for managing loyalty programs. Study results allow the identification of service experience dimensions. Based on this process a new measurement model is proposed for the customer experience factors and includes them into the design of new services. These results are important to understand the impact of some Mobile Experience factors on experience outcomes such as emotions, sensorial descriptors, attitudes, and social self-concept. Previous literature has conceptualized customer experience but empirical studies are still scarce. Helkkula (2011) charactherizes the service experience’s concept demonstrating the existence of empirical studies only as a outcome based. However, in order to better understand this concept, Verhoef et al. (2009) have developed a conceptual model that reveals the holistic influence of antecedents and moderators in the customer experience. Thus, in spite of its interest, complexity and distinctiveness the service experience and its research applied to mobile services, has not been made in-depth so far. Therefore, it is important to study Mobile service identifying its main dimensions so they can be incorporated into New Service Design. This study develops a scale to measure Mobile Service Experience (MSE). Starting from exploratory and qualitative study, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 241 customers around the world. Data analysis allowed the identification of six MSE dimensions: ‘Awareness’ is the extent to which the service is promoted to be known by the general public. ‘Availability’ is the extent to which the service is available and accessible. ‘Usefulness’ is the degree of service’s convenience through an overall experience perspective. ‘Ease of use’ is how the service is ‘ease to learn’ and how ‘appealing’ it is. ‘Security’ is the extent to which the service cares with ‘privacy of data’ and ‘trust’. ‘Service in store’ is the way service takes place in the store environment. This paper contributes as an empirical study of MSE showing that encompasses a broader set of experience factors. MSE dimensions influence the conception of mobile services; their consciousness will be a good contribution to New Service Development

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

Mobile Users and Service Experience Developers

Customer Experiences have become increasingly important as well as challenging to differentiate and add value to products and services. Experiences play a particularly important role in the emerging field of service development and design, as value is cocreated by customers through their interactions with service providers resulting in a unique contextual outcome (Stuart and Tax 2004; Mager 2009). Services are relational and require shared knowledge and background between a company and its costumers (Verhoef, Lemon et al. 2009). Therefore it is considered more difficult to create valuable service experiences when the company is not present (Sandstrom, Magnusson et al. 2009; Verhoef, Lemon et al. 2009), and some authors advocate further research to create memorable service experiences through the design of new interactive applications, its interfaces and its specific mobility (R.S. Subramanya 2007). This research contributes to a better understanding of user’ experience requirements in mobile services and to improve its incorporation into New Service Development. This article reports the results of two qualitative studies that explored experiential factors in mobile services covering regular users of mobile services and designers/developers’perspectives. The first study involved in-depth interviews and focus groups with 25 users of mobile phone services, focusing on the experiential factors of a mobile loyalty service and analyzing existing services. The second study involved a sample of 82 individuals (mainly designers - 52, 6%), during a creative training course on innovation. Mental modelling supported the design of an imaginary mobile service interface through a codiscovery method. Following qualitative methods (Charmaz 2006), both studies were transcribed and analyzed to identify categories of service experience requirements. The analysis accomplishes a comparative assessment of the experiential factors identified by regular users as well as endorsed the identification of requirements influencing mobile service experiences from the designers’ perspective describing it with their own language code. The results of the study with mobile service users allowed for an in-depth understanding of the user experience, which are not strictly related to the design of the interaction device. According to study results, one of the most important factors influencing the mobile service experience is the interaction with service merchants, and the service environment in which the mobile service is used. This subject is relevant when people prefer some mobile systems due to factors such as emotional experiences that might play an important role in addition to functional aspects(Thüring 2007). Other factors such as ease use and its trade-off relationship with privacy, ease of learning, data usage, visualization, were also deemed important. The designers’ group also pointed out some of the experience factors already identified by users, such as ease of use and efficiency, but they paid much more attention to the functional and technological aspects surrounding mobile phones in comparison to the service characteristics. This fact may be a result of their professional backgrounds. This two-way analysis places two unlike approaches and as a result similarities and differences can be identified on how the service processes, and the way interface is used. Although the usability and performance factors are mentioned by both groups, designers do not address the contextual elements that have a strong influence in the overall customer experience, such as the service environment, the service process. This perspective has eased the understanding of the differences and priorities of experience in a mobile loyalty service according to developers and regular user’s perception. Furthermore it has helped to identify the service design elements that affect users and developers’ experiences, such as the interface and the service context of use, and to find their specific responsiveness to the interaction process. This points out to the need of a more collaborative approach from both stances. We believe that this work can contribute to increase this collaboration and therefore add value to service innovation. The New Service Development demands a good understanding of the user’s service experiences, as well as developers that must be aware of this complete service scope

Mobile Service Experience Prototyping: A Holistic View of the Service Experience

Prototyping is a well-established practice in New Product Development. The increasing importance of New Service Development [NSD] and customer experiences has created a significant interest in Service Experience prototyping [SXP]. However, further research is still needed to better define SXP and how it differs from traditional views. This paper presents the results of an empirical study comparing traditional interface prototyping and SXP. Study results reveal significant differences in the inputs gathered from the two prototyping processes. Mobile Service Experiences bring new challenges to NSD and require an awareness of all the mobility aspects, especially for customer-journeys within self-service situations. Designers cannot control the entire experience as they cannot control all the service process. Some authors propose to take social interaction as a starting point and explore co-experience with prototypes. Though experience prototyping is a rather new method with relevant potential its application to services has not been fully explored. There is also authors who advocate that companies can promote trial experiences, involving simulated activity in a simulated setting, thus enabling customers to assess value-in-service. SXP is a form for testing that enables developers and customers to gain first-hand appreciation of a future service. It differs from the conventional prototyping tools, as service experiences should be seen through a holistic outlook, considering the different service encounters in space and time. This paper presents the results of an empirical where two prototyping processes were implemented and compared - Service Experience Prototype and Interface Experience Prototype. This exploratory study was made with five groups of students from NPD/NSD courses. The experiment consisted on prototyping and testing, the same mobile service with the same set of tasks. Participants worked in groups over two related storyboards, where the same tasks of the mobile service were sketched with the different focus. Participants had to decode service tasks into service experience factors, and over the storyboards create a movie script. Subsequently participants were invited to develop the screenplay and perform it. One group evaluated the service experience focusing on the service interface and the other tested the service experience from a more holistic perspective, involving the service process, people and serviscape, and the different service encounters. Study results indicate that no prototype is best to evaluate all service experience components. The qualitative results revealed that SXP participants were able to create an overall representation of the service experience, highlighting service design issues that could not be so easily discovered by the UXP groups, such as people and social context within which the mobile service is used. On other hand participants of the UXP group could test and evaluate in more depth the tangible dimensions of the service interface. The quantitative results corroborated the qualitative results, as the different experimental situations also provided different inputs to the process. Whereas UXP groups we better able to evaluate and indentify improvements regarding ease of use and learn-ability, ‘SXP groups were felt more able to evaluate and identify improvements regarding the overall service offering, involving physical and social context aspects of the service experience. These results show that the SXP does not substitute, but rather complements UXP, as it considers different goals. The resulting feedback helps to determine advantages and disadvantages of each method on assessing a more holistic approach to SXP and helps designers and service developers to enhance superior service experiences. Prototyping the mobile service experience requires testing the service mobile interface, but it should consider all the elements of the service offering in a continuous contextual change. This research provides a new perspective on SXP, highlighting its contributions to the NSD process, in particular to the increasingly pervasive mobile services where customer experience, is a crucial differentiator

New service development in high tech sectors: a decision making perspective

Many service companies active in high tech sectors have implemented largely decentralized decision architectures in their innovation processes. This is done to improve responsiveness under extremely dynamic and uncertain business conditions. As a consequence of the empowerment of decision-makers at the product management level, the success of the New Service Development (NSD) process will increasingly depend on individual product managers’ information processing and decision-making performance. The present study investigates antecedents of decision-making effectiveness in the high tech NSD process, and reports on a case study performed in the mobile telecommunication services industry. NSD project managers’ unique task conditions are articulated, and some antecedents and moderators of effective decision-making are identified in a study of four innovation projects. Findings are integrated in a theoretical framework. The study reveals the crucial role of decision-makers’ flexible use of various cognitive styles, their proactive attitude, and their capability to mentally represent innovation interfaces with the customer, the technology and the firm. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are provided.management and organization theory ;

Business Model Development for a Mobile Context-aware Service

Mobile information services, preceded on tablet computers, smartphones or other mobile devices, are a significant source of information for people nowadays. By including context data, a new category of information services has been established. On the application side, a range of innovative services, providing the user with an added-value, could be observed in the previous years, boosted by the wide-spread adoption of smartphones in developed countries. For the application provider, the question how to configure the business model is crucial: several factors such as the service configuration, the revenue model and the configuration of the value creation network, which all can be seen as decisive factors for success or failure of a service. In this paper we present a context-aware service named \u27Digital Graffiti\u27 and describe the process of the business model development. As an outcome of this process, a specific business model, based on feasibility and future prospect, was chosen and further described