Issues in Mobile E-Commerce

Though many companies are still just beginning to grasp the potential uses and impacts of the Web and e-commerce, advances in technologies and their application continue. These advances often present various managerial and technological issues for individuals, companies, governments, and other entities. One significant area of technological advancement is the development of mobile e-commerce, which encompasses interactive business activities and processes related to a (potential) commercial transaction conducted through communications networks that interface with wireless devices. These systems provide the potential for organizations and users to perform various commerce-related tasks without regard to time and location (anytime from anywhere). This emerging mobile e-commerce environment presents a new set of issues. This paper identifies and categorizes some of these issues so that researchers, developers, and managers have a starting point for focusing their activities within the emerging m-commerce domain. Our examination finds categories that include technological (both client and infrastructure) issues, application issues, and areas for future research

Designing visual notification cues for mobile devices

This paper discusses field-testing of visual notification cues on a mobile handheld device. Each cue consisted of three multicolored lights preceded by a tactile signal (vibration). After being customized, the cues were sent periodically to the device over a wireless network as users went about their normal activities. User personalization seemed to enhance learning and usefulness of the cues, while the additional tactile signal aided arrival awareness

An investigation into web site design complexity and usability metrics. Quarterly journal of electronic commerce, forthcoming

Chumpa for their assistance with Web page modifications, data collection, and analysis. Carol Adams and Ergosoft are graciously acknowledged for allowing their ergoBrowser software to be used as part of this experiment. 1 This research investigates the use of Web site design complexity and usability metrics. An informational Web site was redesigned with regard to a set of complexity metrics, which measure quantitative aspects of Web site design, with the goal of increasing the site’s usability. An experiment was then performed to test the usability of the redesigned site against the original site. Usability was judged not only by traditional metrics such as task performance time and the number of errors, but also by more Web-specific measures such as the number of links clicked. Results show that the redesigned site is perceived as more useable than the current site and allows users to perform information retrieval tasks better. The research also illustrates how complexity metrics might be used early in the design phase to create a more usable Web site, and how the addition of more “Web specific ” metrics might contribute to better measurement of overall site usability

A new error metric for text entry method evaluation

On devices such as mobile phones, text is often entered using keypads and predictive text entry techniques. Current metrics used for measuring text entry error rates have limitations in terms of the types of errors they account for, and cannot easily distinguish between different types of errors. This research proposes a new text entry error metric that addresses some of the outstanding issues that exist with current metrics. Specifically, the metric accounts in detail for the way the user handles corrections during text entry, moving beyond current keystroke level error measurement. The feasibility and usefulness of this new metric is shown through the analysis of an experiment that tests an alphabetically constrained keypad design that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Author Keywords Mobile device user interface design, error metrics, predictive keypad text entry, novice learning and usability. ACM Classification Keywords H5.2. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)