Interfaces of Mobile Devices

How Can the Interfaces of Mobile Devices Be Made More Usable?

Milena Head & Khaled Hassanein

Background

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) has emerged as a natural extension to e-commerce, providing users with anytime, anywhere access via portable devices. M-commerce can allow employees flexible, convenient and ubiquitous access to business applications, services and processes that are vital to the effective operation of the organization, and provide for new ways through which evolving customer needs could be met. Potential applications for m-commerce span across market segments, such as banking, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, service-driven enterprises, and companies with large mobile workforces, remote or multi-site operations.

Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many m-commerce applications remain difficult to use. For example, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is currently a key mobile technology that has experienced a wide range of criticism, including its difficulty of use. As with other domains, interface design is critical to the success of this emerging communication and information retrieval channel. Compared with e-commerce, m-commerce demands shorter sessions, fewer errors, and more succinct information. Additionally, screen sizes are substantially smaller, site structures are more difficult to convey and user input and navigation are more awkward.

Project Description

This project seeks to explore the application of human computer interaction methods to an m-commerce environment, and to design, construct and evaluate interface alternatives for various m-commerce applications. More specifically, this project will include:

• An investigation of current customer concerns with mobile commerce via a detailed survey.
• A thorough study of current usability problems with mobile devices, via usability tests that focus on information content, ease of use, usefulness, acceptability and trustworthiness.
• The development of a predictive model that will help explain the outcomes of existing designs and predict the usability of new designs.
• Based on the above findings and proposed model, new interface designs will be developed, evaluated and compared with each other and existing designs across various m-commerce applications.
• Explicit design guidelines will be proposed for mobile device interfaces.

Potential Benefits to a Sponsoring Organization

An organization can benefit from sponsoring this project by:

• Obtaining a better understanding of how m-commerce can benefit its customers, trading partners or employees.
• Acquiring workable and usable solutions for its m-commerce applications. Such solutions will automatically configure themselves to suite a wide range of wireless devices.
• Gaining detailed and explicit guidelines for its future m-commerce application development.