Towards Design Excellence for Context-Aware Services - The Case of Mobile Navigation Apps

To satisfy service customers and create unique value in a digitized world, companies must strive for exceeding customers’ expectations of e-service experience by establishing high e-service quality. However, an increasing amount of e-services is performed by context-aware mobile technology, which is able to sense and react to changes in the user’s environment. Although these context-aware services are able to address our personal needs and already determine our everyday live, knowledge on how to develop such services is sparse. In our study, we qualitatively compare three mobile navigation apps based on their user reviews in order to elicit first requirements and design approaches for e-service quality oriented design. Results show that well known e-service quality models are not fully applicable to the case of mobile navigation services

Classifying Smart Personal Assistants: An Empirical Cluster Analysis

The digital age has yielded systems that increasingly reduce the complexity of our everyday lives. As such, smart personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri combine the comfort of intuitive natural language interaction with the utility of personalized and situation-dependent information and service provision. However, research on SPAs is becoming increasingly complex and opaque. To reduce complexity, this paper introduces a classification system for SPAs. Based on a systematic literature review, a cluster analysis reveals five SPA archetypes: Adaptive Voice (Vision) Assistants, Chatbot Assistants, Embodied Virtual Assistants, Passive Pervasive Assistants, and Natural Conversation Assistants

Value Co-Creation in Smart Services: A Functional Affordances Perspective on Smart Personal Assistants

In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become a popular medium for value co-creation between service providers and users. The market success of SPAs is largely based on their innovative material properties, such as natural language user interfaces, machine learning-powered request handling and service provision, and anthropomorphism. In different combinations, these properties offer users entirely new ways to intuitively and interactively achieve their goals and thus co-create value with service providers. But how does the nature of the SPA shape value co-creation processes? In this paper, we look through a functional affordances lens to theorize about the effects of different types of SPAs (i.e., with different combinations of material properties) on users’ value co-creation processes. Specifically, we collected SPAs from research and practice by reviewing scientific literature and web resources, developed a taxonomy of SPAs’ material properties, and performed a cluster analysis to group SPAs of a similar nature. We then derived 2 general and 11 cluster-specific propositions on how different material properties of SPAs can yield different affordances for value co-creation. With our work, we point out that smart services require researchers and practitioners to fundamentally rethink value co-creation as well as revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart

TOWARDS SMART ASSISTANCE SYSTEMS FOR PHYSICAL AND MANUAL TASKS

Although automation of physical work is continuously accelerated by advances in information technology, many complex tasks, such as in manufacturing, assembly or maintenance still require human work. In this context, Smart Physical and Manual Task Assistance Systems (SPMTAs) support workers by adapting to their current situation or task. Since the importance of physical work is still evident in a digitized economy, there is a need for properly designed SPMTAs in order to increase job satisfaction and performance of workers by taking off physical and cognitive strain. However, scientific literature on how to design SPMTAs is sparse. Combining sociotechnical systems and work design theory, we derived propositions and conducted interviews with workers of a German car component manufacturer as part of a design science project. The company uses three SPMTAs for assembly, final inspection, and tool management. As a result, we elicited 18 design requirements for SPMTAs to increase job satisfaction and performance. In this research-in-progress paper, we present our preliminary results and discuss next steps

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAVING IDEAS – IT’S ABOUT MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN! FOSTERING EXPLORATORY INNOVATION WITH THE INTRAPRENEUR ACCELERATOR

Organizations usually strive for innovation to achieve economic growth. Thereby, incremental innova-tion of e.g., existing products is often the most attractive way because it is plannable to a certain ex-tent and often reveals short-term success. However, many markets change due to new competitive structures caused by the rise of digital services, which facilitates market entries of new companies. For an incumbent firm trying to cope with these competitors, exploitation of existing ideas and tech-nologies (i.e., incremental innovation) is not enough. Although these firms usually pay minor attention to it, they need to additionally explore how to establish disruptive innovation that complements or even changes their traditional business model before competitors do. In this contribution, we present a novel structure to foster exploratory innovation within incumbent organizations by unleashing the in-novative potential of intrapreneurs as peripheral innovators: the Intrapreneur Accelerator. We con-sider this novel structure a service system for supporting intrapreneurs to develop and implement ex-traordinary ideas and thus fostering exploratory innovation for the organization. Using a design sci-ence approach, we will further present our methodology and our preliminary results, since we have already conducted two of four design iterations

Ein interdisziplinärer Ansatz am Beispiel smarter persönlicher Assistenten

Gefördert im Rahmen des Projekts DEA

Handlungsbroschüre. Anforderungs- und Entwurfsmuster zur rechtsverträglichen und qualitätszentrierten Gestaltung kontextsensitiver Applikationen (AnEkA). Handlungsempfehlungen zur Gestaltung von Entwurfsmustern

Diese Broschüre ist im Rahmen des DFG-Projektes „Anforderungs- und Entwurfsmuster zur rechtsverträglichen und qualitätszentrierten Gestaltung kontextsensitiver Applikationen (AnEkA)“ entstanden. Das Projekt wird von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) gefördert (Projektnummer: 348084924). Die Laufzeit des Projektes ist vom 01.09.2017-01.01.202