Modeling users’ acceptance of mobile services

The success of mobile services adoption hinges on their ability to cover user needs and attract consumer interest. The extant literature focuses on understanding the factors that might affect consumers’ actual adoption of such services through their effect on behavioral intention; these studies are mostly based on behavioral intention theories, such as Technology Acceptance Model, Diffusion of Innovation and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. In this work, new theoretical constructs are combined with existing evidence in order to extend the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as it was initially established by Davis and later further enriched by other researchers. The proposed model includes behavioral intention, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust, innovativeness, relationship drivers, and functionality. Within this approach, relationship drivers introduce a marketing perspective to the original models of technology adoption by building emotional connections between the users and the mobile services. The hypothesized model is empirically tested using data collected from a survey on m-commerce consumers. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to evaluate the causal model and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model. It is briefly concluded that behavioral intention is directly affected by perceived usefulness, innovativeness and relationship drivers; the findings provide interesting insights and useful hints to practitioners and researchers.     

Empowering the users? A critical textual analysis of the role of users in open source software development

This paper outlines a critical, textual approach for the analysis of the relationship between different actors in information technology (IT) production, and further concretizes the approach in the analysis of the role of users in the open source software (OSS) development literature. Central concepts of the approach are outlined. The role of users is conceptualized as reader involvement aiming to contribute to the configuration of the reader (to how users and the parameters for their work practices are defined in OSS texts). Afterwards, OSS literature addressing reader involvement is critically reviewed. In OSS context, the OSS writers as readers configure the reader and other readers are assumed to be capable of and interested in commenting the texts. A lack of OSS research on non-technical reader involvement is identified. Furthermore, not only are the OSS readers configured, but so are OSS writers. In OSS context while writers may be empowered, this clearly does not apply to the non-technical OSS readers. Implication for research and practice are discussed.

---

Differentially private counting of users’ spatial regions

Mining of spatial data is an enabling technology for mobile services, Internet-connected cars and the Internet of Things. But the very distinctiveness of spatial data that drives utility can cost user privacy. Past work has focused upon points and trajectories for differentially private release. In this work, we continue the tradition of privacy-preserving spatial analytics, focusing not on point or path data, but on planar spatial regions. Such data represent the area of a user’s most frequent visitation—such as “around home and nearby shops”. Specifically we consider the differentially private release of data structures that support range queries for counting users’ spatial regions. Counting planar regions leads to unique challenges not faced in existing work. A user’s spatial region that straddles multiple data structure cells can lead to duplicate counting at query time. We provably avoid this pitfall by leveraging the Euler characteristic for the first time with differential privacy. To address the increased sensitivity of range queries to spatial region data, we calibrate privacy-preserving noise using bounded user region size and a constrained inference that uses robust least absolute deviations. Our novel constrained inference reduces noise and promotes covertness by (privately) imposing consistency. We provide a full end-to-end theoretical analysis of both differential privacy and high-probability utility for our approach using concentration bounds. A comprehensive experimental study on several real-world datasets establishes practical validity.     

Studying users’ perception of IoT mobile companion apps

Internet of Things (IoT) products provide over-the-net capabilities such as remote activation, monitoring, and notifications. An associated mobile app is often provided for more convenient usage of these capabilities. The perceived quality of these companion apps can impact the success of the IoT product. We investigate the perceived quality and prominent issues of smart-home IoT mobile companion apps with the aim of deriving insights to: (i) provide guidance to end users interested in adopting IoT products; (ii) inform companion app developers and IoT producers about characteristics frequently criticized by users; (iii) highlight open research directions. We employ a mixed-methods approach, analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. We assess the perceived quality of companion apps by quantitatively analyzing the star rating and the sentiment of 1,347,799 Android and 48,498 iOS user reviews. We identify the prominent issues that afflict companion apps by performing a qualitative manual analysis of 1,000 sampled reviews. Our analysis shows that users’ judgment has not improved over the years. A variety of functional and non-functional issues persist, such as difficulties in pairing with the device, software flakiness, poor user interfaces, and presence of issues of a socio-technical impact. Our study highlights several aspects of companion apps that require improvement in order to meet user expectations and identifies future directions.     

Role of users’ status quo on continuance intentions

Accelerated technological innovations have led to shorter product life cycles. Yet, consumers often decide not to discard the incumbent technology in favor of a new technology. To explain this decision-making process, a rich research stream has investigated subconscious motivations. However, there is little understanding of the role of conscious motivations and, more importantly, their interplay with subconscious motivations in their decisions. Using the value appreciation perspective, we controlled for the predictors of the second version of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) and leverage prospect theory to enrich our understanding of users’ continuance intentions. We conceptualize status quo preference with two new constructs—namely, the value of status quo and users’ commitment to status quo—and integrate them with other known predictors of continuance intentions (related to an incumbent system)—i.e., trust and habit. We empirically test our model in two studies. Study 1 was conducted among 2,096 users of smartphones in Hong Kong. Study 2 reports longitudinal data, across three waves of data collection over a period of six months, from 240 analysts introduced to a new technology to support their work in a large financial services organization. The findings support our model and suggest that (1) users’ status quo preferences significantly determine continuance intentions; and (2) trust and habit have an effect on users’ status quo preferences. These findings advance knowledge on continuance intentions by integrating the effects of users’ conscious and subconscious intentions to continue using the incumbent technology.     

Ranking entities on the basis of users’ opinions

Online opinions are one of the most important sources of information on which users base their purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, the large quantity of opinions makes it difficult for an individual to consume in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike standard information retrieval problems, the task here is to retrieve entities whose relevance is dependent upon other people’s opinions regarding the entities and how well those sentiments match the user’s own preferences. We propose novel techniques that incorporate aspect subjectivity measures into weighting the relevance of opinions of entities based on a user’s query keywords. We calculate these weights using sentiment polarity of terms found proximity close to keywords in opinion text. We have implemented our techniques, and we show that these improve the overall effectiveness of the baseline retrieval task. Our results indicate that on entities with long opinions our techniques can perform as good as state-of-the-art query expansion approaches.     

Method of intelligent recommendation of Web serviceresources towards users balanced requirements

研究了满足用户在服务功能、服务属性和服务质量上的多层次均衡需求的Web服务资源智能推荐方法, 解决了服务信息过载问题。现有服务推荐技术存在未考虑用户对服务多层次均衡需求的不足, 结合Web服务资源的特点, 综合考虑用户服务需求与候选服务群之间的多层次相似度, 设计了综合Web服务资源的功能、属性和质量三个层次的适合度匹配算法, 以及用户主观兴趣度匹配算法。通过这两个算法建立了面向用户均衡需求的个性化Web服务资源智能推荐方法, 能将最大匹配度的Web服务资源推荐给目标用户。     

User-centred design: for users or by users?

Abstract

When ergonomists contribute to the design of products and services they aim to be user-centred. This paper explores two possible meanings of user-centredness; the ergonomist may use theories and findings about human behaviour to act for the user or may help the user to participate in design. Both approaches are well known in ergonomics and they can point in conflicting directions. This paper examines the rationale for the two approaches and presents the results of a survey, which found that the most successful strategy was to mix the two approaches. It offers a classification to support the identification of the appropriate approach to adopt in different situations. The paper proposes, for example, that ‘design by users’ is the appropriate strategy when significant value judgements have to be taken in a local or bespoke design setting. By contrast a ‘design for users’ approach is appropriate for the design of generic products. An additional approach ‘design for users with users’ is introduced for settings that require knowledge about human characteristics and that need users to make value judgements.     

Who are the users? Who are the developers? Webs of users and developers in the development process of a technical standard

The paper presents an empirical study of user involvement in developing a technical standard for a scientific community's information system project. The case illustrates how multiple perspectives are involved when considering the user role in practice. The case presents a situation where both developers and users were pre‐defined in the design and development phases of the standard as homogeneous groups of actors. Groups of actors changed to become more heterogeneous and ‘fluid’ in the deployment and implementation phases, thus forming ‘webs of developers’ and ‘webs of users’. Detailed analysis of the process in its entirety shows the blurredness of boundaries between ‘developer’ and ‘user’ categories and roles, and reveals challenges at social and organizational levels. Three models pertaining to the system development process are presented in order to illuminate differing perspectives on the user and on the development process itself. The paper draws theoretically from information systems, social informatics, and science and technology studies. The research contributes to a deeper, interdisciplinary understanding of ‘the’ user, of multiple roles in systems development, and of dynamic sets of user–developer relations.     

Always connected,but are smart mobile users getting more security savvy? A survey of smart mobile device users

Smart mobile devices are a potential attack vector for cyber criminal activities. Two hundred and fifty smart mobile device owners from the University of South Australia were surveyed. Not surprisingly, it was found that smart mobile device users in the survey generally underestimated the value that their collective identities have to criminals and how these can be sold. For example, participants who reported jail-breaking/rooting their devices were also more likely to exhibit risky behaviour (e.g. downloading and installing applications from unknown providers), and the participants generally had no idea of the value of their collective identities to criminals which can be sold to the highest bidder. In general, the participants did not understand the risks and may not have perceived cyber crime to be a real threat. Findings from the survey and the escalating complexities of the end-user mobile and online environment underscore the need for regular ongoing training programs for basic online security and the promotion of a culture of security among smart mobile device users. For example, targeted education and awareness programmes could be developed to inform or educate smart mobile device users and correct misconceptions or myths in order to bring about changes in attitudes and usage behaviour (e.g. not taking preventative measures such as strong passwords to protect their devices). Such initiatives would enable all end users (including senior University management who use such devices to access privileged corporate data and accounts) to maintain current knowledge of the latest cyber crime activities and the best cyber security protection measures available.     

Valuation of online social networks taking into account users’ interconnectedness

Online social networks have been gaining increasing economic importance in light of the rising number of their users. Numerous recent acquisitions priced at enormous amounts have illustrated this development and revealed the need for adequate business valuation models. The value of an online social network is largely determined by the value of its users, the relationships between these users, and the resulting network effects. Therefore, the interconnectedness of a user within the network has to be considered explicitly to get a reasonable estimate for its economic value. Established standard business valuation models, however, do not account for these aspects sufficiently. Thus, we propose an economic model for the valuation of online social networks, which takes into account the users’ interconnectedness within the network. Furthermore, we analyze different centrality measures, which can be used to quantify users’ interconnectedness in online social networks and propose a measure which is based on the PageRank-algorithm. Finally, the practical application of the model is illustrated by an example of the European online social network XING.com.     

Can internet users protect themselves? Challenges and techniques of automated protection of HTTP communication

HTTPS enables secure access to web content and web-based services. Although supported by many content and service providers, HTTPS is oftentimes not enabled by default, as pointed out in an open letter sent to Google by security experts. In this article, we discuss if and how web users can protect themselves by using HTTPS instead of HTTP. We show that many websites allow for accessing content by HTTPS instead of HTTP. However, HTTPS access must be manually configured or requested by the user, or is impossible at all, e.g., for embedded objects. For this reason, we explore how to protect users transparently by automatically using HTTPS whenever possible. In order to enable this approach, one needs to determine whether using HTTPS yields the same content as using HTTP, even in the presence of dynamic websites incorporating advertisements and news. We show that this decision is possible for entire websites like amazon.com in short time by combining a fast content comparison algorithm, result caching, and observations on the structure of the website. Besides the concrete HTTP use case considered in this article, our results are of independent interest for any setting in which content can be accessed by various means. Finally, we present and discuss different approaches for implementing automated protection of HTTP connections.     

A framework for preservation of cloud users’ data privacy using dynamic reconstruction of metadata

In the rising paradigm of cloud computing, attainment of sustainable levels of cloud users’ trust in using cloud services is directly dependent on effective mitigation of its associated impending risks and resultant security threats. Among the various indispensible security services required to ensure effective cloud functionality leading to enhancement of users’ confidence in using cloud offerings, those related to the preservation of cloud users’ data privacy are significantly important and must be matured enough to withstand the imminent security threats, as emphasized in this research paper. This paper highlights the possibility of exploiting the metadata stored in cloud's database in order to compromise the privacy of users’ data items stored using a cloud provider's simple storage service. It, then, proposes a framework based on database schema redesign and dynamic reconstruction of metadata for the preservation of cloud users’ data privacy. Using the sensitivity parameterization parent class membership of cloud database attributes, the database schema is modified using cryptographic as well as relational privacy preservation operations. At the same time, unaltered access to database files is ensured for the cloud provider using dynamic reconstruction of metadata for the restoration of original database schema, when required. The suitability of the proposed technique with respect to private cloud environments is ensured by keeping the formulation of its constituent steps well aligned with the recommendations proposed by various Standards Development Organizations working in this domain.     

Adaptation of an automotive dialogue system to users’ expertise and evaluation of the system

Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) can be used to operate devices, e.g. in the automotive environment. People using these systems usually have different levels of experience. However, most systems do not take this into account. In this paper, we present a method to build a dialogue system in an automotive environment that automatically adapts to the user’s experience with the system. We implemented the adaptation in a prototype and carried out exhaustive tests. Our usability tests show that adaptation increases both user performance and user satisfaction. We describe the tests that were performed, and the methods used to assess the test results. One of these methods is a modification of PARADISE, a framework for evaluating the performance of SDSs [Walker MA, Litman DJ, Kamm CA, Abella A (Comput Speech Lang 12(3):317–347, 1998)]. We discuss its drawbacks for the evaluation of SDSs like ours, the modifications we have carried out, and the test results.

Determinants of users’ intention to adopt m-commerce: an empirical analysis

The fast-growing penetration of mobile devices and recent advances in mobile technologies have led to the development of increasingly sophisticated services such as m-shopping for goods or services and m-payment. However, although the number of mobile subscribers is increasing, levels of actual m-commerce activities in many cases remain low. Determining what influences users’ intention to use m-commerce is therefore of growing importance. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible factors. To this aim, we developed a conceptual user adoption model based on technology acceptance model variables and on specific factors such as social influence, personal innovativeness, customization, and individual mobility. The empirical results show that social influence and customization significantly affect perceived usefulness; mobility, customization, and personal innovativeness significantly affect perceived ease of use; and perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a direct positive effect on behavioral intention.     

What do web users do? An empirical analysis of web use

This paper provides an empirical characterization of user actions at the web browser. The study is based on an analysis of 4 months of logged client-side data that describes user actions with recent versions of Netscape Navigator. In particular, the logged data allow us to determine the title, URL and time of each page visit, how often they visited each page, how long they spent at each page, the growth and content of bookmark collections, as well as a variety of other aspects of user interaction with the web. The results update and extend prior empirical characterizations of web use. Among the results we show that web page revisitation is a much more prevalent activity than previously reported (approximately 81% of pages have been previously visited by the user), that most pages are visited for a surprisingly short period of time, that users maintain large (and possibly overwhelming) bookmark collections, and that there is a marked lack of commonality in the pages visited by different users. These results have implications for a wide range of web-based tools including the interface features provided by web browsers, the design of caching proxy servers, and the design of efficient web sites.     

The influence of multimedia training on users’ attitudes: lessons learned

The workforce within the US is increasingly culturally diverse and mobile. Rapid technological changes, coupled with cultural diversity and employee mobility, have created the milieu for critical issues in organizational training methods. Effective learning systems enable employees to adapt more easily to change, thereby increasing their effectiveness. Multimedia systems can be the solution to enhancing performance effectively and efficiently by accelerated learning. This paper examines such a system developed by Holiday Inn Worldwide for the implementation of a new information system. Individuals’ performance and attitudes were tracked for two primary groups: those receiving training on a new information system using traditional training methods and those using a multimedia CDROM to acquire mastery of the same system. 826 employees participated, 467 of them were trained by the multimedia system. Attitude measures included attitudes toward self: job, training, and technology. Individual performance was measured by standardized tests on employees’ knowledge of the new information system. Our findings demonstrated that users’ attitudes were consistently poorer when trained at sites which employed multimedia training when compared with users trained in using a more traditional approach.     

Exploring the feasibility of web form adaptation to users’ cultural dimension scores

With many daily tasks now performed on the Internet, productivity and efficiency in working with web pages have become transversal necessities for all users. Many of these tasks involve the inputting of user information, obligating the user to interact with a webform. Research has demonstrated that productivity depends largely on users’ personal characteristics, implying that it will vary from user to user. The webform development process must therefore, include modeling of its intended users to ensure the interface design is appropriate. Taking all potential users into account is difficult, however, primarily because their identity is unknown, and some may be effectively excluded by the final design. Such discrimination can be avoided by incorporating rules that allow webforms to adapt automatically to the individual user’s characteristics, the principal one being the person’s culture. In this paper we report two studies that validate this option. We begin by determining the relationships between a user’s cultural dimension scores and their behavior when faced with a webform. We then validate the notion that rules based on these relationships can be established for the automatic adaptation of a webform in order to reduce the time taken to complete it. We conclude that the automatic webform adaptation to the cultural dimensions of users improves their performance.     

Understanding the new digital divide—A typology of Internet users in Europe

The purpose of this study is to better understand the digital divide by identifying the variety of ways in which people in Europe use the Internet. First, by using cluster analysis on survey data (N=12,666/age: 16–74 years) from Eurostat on Internet usage in Norway, Sweden, Austria, the UK, and Spain, we identified five user types: Non-Users (42%), Sporadic Users (18%), Instrumental Users (18%), Entertainment Users (10%), and Advanced Users (12%). These user types differ in their distributions over country, age, access, household members, and gender. An alarming finding is that 60% of the population was found to be either Non-Users or Sporadic Users, which reflects a large digital divide in Europe. Second, we conducted a logistic regression to identify the predictors for different user types. We found on a cross-national level that age and Internet access are the most salient predictors, whereas gender and household seems to be less relevant. However, the amount of variance explained differs between countries. We also suggested a future increase in the digital divide between the identified user types—a user type divide. The user typology and the identified predictors might help researchers, practitioners, and decision makers to better understand Internet users and the multi-complex variations among individuals and countries. This knowledge will also serve as a means to understand the digital divide by providing a more nuanced perspective on Europeans' unequal usage of the Internet and participation in an increasingly digital society.