Attitude towards branded mobile applications and reuse intention : the moderating effect of gender and prior brand involvement

Mobile applications (apps) have created a significant interest among advertisers and marketers, mostly because of their positive impact on user´s attitude and high level of engagement towards the brand. This study analyses the impact of gender-specific tendencies in the assessment of utilitarian and hedonic oriented branded mobile apps, highlighting that utilitarian content is favoured when intending to reuse mobile applications. The thesis strives to understand customer’s attitude towards branded mobile applications via pre-test and post-test survey focusing on four mobile branded applications- Google Map, Snapchat, Uber and Tinder. Pearson correlation and linear regression are used to understand the positive relationship between attitude and reuse intention and one-way Anova is used to understand gender preferences towards utilitarian and hedonic content of branded mobile apps. Results indicate that individual’s attitudes are strongly positively related with their reuse intention. Likewise, for Gender, men & women both have a higher tendency to reuse utilitarian apps, as contrary to the developed hypothesis that women mostly prefer hedonic app rather than utilitarian app. Additionally, the results conclude that the level of prior brand involvement may not necessarily moderate individual’s immediate response towards branded mobile application and reuse intention. Finally, implications associated with the findings are discussed with respect to clarifying possible outcomes obtained during result analysis and initiate solutions to improve further studies in this area.Este estudo analisa o impacto de tendências específicas de cada género na avaliação das marcas de aplicações móveis utilitaristas e hedónicas, realçando que a informação de conteúdo utilitarista é preferida no que toca à reutilização de aplicações. A tese procura compreender a atitude do cliente perante as marcas das aplicações através de questionário pré e pós-teste, focando-se em quatro aplicações: Google Map, Snapchat, Uber e Tinder. A correlação de Pearson e a regressão linear são usadas para entender a relação entre atitude e intenção de reutilização. Análise de variância é usada para perceber a preferência entre conteúdos das aplicações utilitaristas e hedónicas. Os resultados indicam que as atitudes individuais estão muito positivamente relacionadas com a intenção de reutilização. De igual modo, para género, homens e mulheres têm ambos uma grande tendência para reutilizar aplicações utilitaristas, contrariamente com a hipótese desenvolvida que as mulheres preferem aplicações hedónicas. Além disso, os resultados concluem que o nível de envolvimento anterior da marca pode não necessariamente moderar a resposta imediata do indivíduo em relação à aplicação móvel e à intenção de reutilização da marca. Finalmente, as implicações associadas com as conclusões são discutidas de forma a clarificar resultados possivelmente obtidos durante a análise dos dados e iniciar soluções para melhorar estudo adicionais nesta área

ReCon: Revealing and Controlling PII Leaks in Mobile Network Traffic

It is well known that apps running on mobile devices extensively track and leak users' personally identifiable information (PII); however, these users have little visibility into PII leaked through the network traffic generated by their devices, and have poor control over how, when and where that traffic is sent and handled by third parties. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of ReCon: a cross-platform system that reveals PII leaks and gives users control over them without requiring any special privileges or custom OSes. ReCon leverages machine learning to reveal potential PII leaks by inspecting network traffic, and provides a visualization tool to empower users with the ability to control these leaks via blocking or substitution of PII. We evaluate ReCon's effectiveness with measurements from controlled experiments using leaks from the 100 most popular iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps, and via an IRB-approved user study with 92 participants. We show that ReCon is accurate, efficient, and identifies a wider range of PII than previous approaches.Comment: Please use MobiSys version when referencing this work: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2906392. 18 pages, recon.meddle.mob

Supporting reflection and creative thinking by carers of older people with dementia

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Automated Test Input Generation for Android: Are We There Yet?

Mobile applications, often simply called "apps", are increasingly widespread, and we use them daily to perform a number of activities. Like all software, apps must be adequately tested to gain confidence that they behave correctly. Therefore, in recent years, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to investigate ways to automate apps testing. In particular, because of Android's open source nature and its large share of the market, a great deal of research has been performed on input generation techniques for apps that run on the Android operating systems. At this point in time, there are in fact a number of such techniques in the literature, which differ in the way they generate inputs, the strategy they use to explore the behavior of the app under test, and the specific heuristics they use. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these existing approaches, and get general insight on ways they could be made more effective, in this paper we perform a thorough comparison of the main existing test input generation tools for Android. In our comparison, we evaluate the effectiveness of these tools, and their corresponding techniques, according to four metrics: code coverage, ability to detect faults, ability to work on multiple platforms, and ease of use. Our results provide a clear picture of the state of the art in input generation for Android apps and identify future research directions that, if suitably investigated, could lead to more effective and efficient testing tools for Android

Agora Teaching App

Professional development of teachers normally ends after formal collegiate education. Agora desires to help educators continually train, to learn the skills of good teaching in classrooms by using various, non-traditional methodologies. By translating Agoras current platform to an app, Agora can widen their scope and serve Latin American countries outside of Peru, where they are currently based. We will simply take their current business and course platform and provide a mobile user interface for it. By expanding the reach of Agora, Latin American teachers will be well equipped to teach their classes with innovation and effectiveness

Agile Beeswax: Mobile App Development Process and Empirical Study in Real Environment

Mobile application development is a highly competitive environment; agile methodologies can enable teams to provide value faster, with higher quality and predictability, and a better attitude to deal with the continuous changes that will arise in the mobile context application (App), and the positive impact of that on sustainable development through continuous progress. App development is different from other types of software. For this reason, our objective is to present a new agilebased methodology for app development that we call Agile Beeswax. Agile Beeswax is conceived after identifying the mobile development process’s issues and challenges, and unique requirements. Agile Beeswax is an incremental, iterative development process composed of two main iterative loops (sprints), the incremental design loop and the incremental development loop, and one bridge connecting these two sprints. Agile Beeswax is structured in six phases, idea and strategy, user experience design, user interface design, design to development, handoff and technical decisions, development, and deployment and monitoring. One of its main strengths is that it has been created with academic and business perspectives to bring these two communities closer. To achieve this purpose, our research methodology comprises four main phases: Phase 1: Extensive literature review of mobile development methodologies, Phase 2: Interviews with mobile application developers working in small to medium software companies, Phase 3: Survey to extract valuable knowledge about mobile development (which was carefully designed based on the results of the first and the second phases), and Phase 4: Proposal of a new methodology for the agile development of mobile applications. With the aim of integrating both perspectives, the survey was answered by a sample of 35 experts, including academics and developers. Interesting results have been collected and discussed in this paper (on issues such as the development process, the tools used during this process, and the general issues and challenges they encountered), laying the foundations of the methodology Agile Beeswax proposed to develop mobile apps. Our results and the proposed methodology are intended to serve as support for mobile application developers.Spanish Government European Commission RTI2018-096986-B-C3