Mobile Electronic Commerce through the Web Harri Oinas-Kukkonen Department of Information Processing Science University of Oulu P.O. Box 3000, 90401 Oulu, Finland
[email protected] http://vrflow.oulu.fi/, http://www.tol.oulu.fi/~hok/ Abstract The purpose of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it discusses a research experiment with a mobile Web information system. Empirical findings suggest that usefulness and fluent navigation predict a positive use experience in these. Secondly, the paper introduces general design principles for developing such systems for mobile electronic commerce. These design principles suggest that (1) Web information systems should be designed as mobile aware, (2) they should be designed as hypertext information systems, and (3) the development should be carried out through developing rich Web information systems. Techniques, such as trimmed links, rich links, maps and guided tours, and adaptive hypermedia approach are also described. Keywords: Electronic commerce, telecommunications, mobile phones, WWW, hypermedia, flow.
1. Introduction Organizations seek benefits associated with increased competitiveness and better information and they implement electronic commerce to support differentiation or focus strategies [12]. The Internet and future mobile data networks provide marketing and commerce with many possibilities. The virtual environment that the Internet's hypertext-based World Wide Web technology enables may provide companies with new kinds of markets, new information-based products, new means of promotion, new means of logistics and payment, and new organizational forms. In a knowledge intensive Web environment a company may do more than only send messages to consumers, since it may customize the services to suit the consumers’ specific needs and interests. Consumers may
navigate in a virtual environment and select what they want to experience. Mobility of users will request even more malleable patterns of conducting electronic commerce, because handheld portable devices have many restrictions, such as small display, limited input facilities, small memory and computational resources, and a narrowband network connection. Hypermedia [2, 5, 8, 9, 10] should be considered in the context of the telecommunication society of the future, its services and industries, utilizing hypermedia embedded in telecommunication products and services. With mobile hypermedia and 3rd and 4th generation digital media phones and broadband digital wireless networks, totally new concepts for electronic commerce can be studied, modeled, constructed and measured. An important aspect in this is to obtain a deeper understanding of user interaction with these personal virtual environments, and to learn design better e-commerce systems. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it discusses a research experiment with a mobile Web information system. Secondly, it introduces general design principles for developing such systems for mobile electronic commerce, and describes some techniques and approaches to accomplish this.
2. Mobile E-commerce Research Experiment A mobile e-commerce prototype was developed (originally in February 1999) to study the development and use of these through currently available approaches. The system was developed using Nokia WAP Software Development Kit 1.0 and utilized through the emulator in this environment. 1 The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard specifies an application framework and network protocols for wireless devices such as mobile phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants. The specifications extend and leverage mobile networking technologies and Internet technologies. Wireless Markup Language (WML) is based on eXtended Markup Language (XML) [3, 20], and it is designed for use of narrowband devices, including mobile phones. Four major functional areas of WML are: text presentation and layout, deck/card organizational metaphor, inter-card navigation and linking, and string parameterization and state management.2 Information in WML is organized into a collection of cards and decks. Cards specify unit(s) of user interaction, e.g. menu choices, screens of text or text entry fields. Decks correspond to HTML 1 One of the prominent currently available approaches is the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) phone approach, which helps bend Web applications towards mobile phones. Other approaches for mobile e-commerce also exist, like accessing the Web through communicators or palmtop computers. In the future, mobile phone interfaces should be bent towards the Web. 2 http://wapforum.org/
pages, in that these are identified by URLs and are units of content transmission. They can be parameterized and variables can be used in the place of strings and they are substituted at run-time. Event handling and script execution have also been addressed.3 The prototype system collects information at 15 minute intervals from several charge-free sources on the Web. These include information about stocks, weather, movies, television programs, sports results, restaurant menus etc. For example, a business man travelling from Oulu to Jyväskylä can check Nokia's latest stock rates, or weather conditions at his destination (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Mobile application. An important aspect for developing mobile e-commerce systems successfully is to obtain a deeper understanding of the user’s interaction with these personal virtual environments. Measuring the flow use experiences can help achieve this. Csikszentmihalyi [6] describes flow as “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement. Hoffman and Novak [8] describe flow as being a state, in which navigating the Web is intrinsically enjoyable, self-reinforcing and accompanied by a loss of self-consciousness. They suggest that flow experience can exist in both experimental and goaloriented types of behavior. A primary antecedent condition necessary for experiencing the flow state is that skills and challenges are perceived to be congruent and above a critical threshold. Novak and Hoffman [13] have tentatively demonstrated a significant predictive ability of flow, and its orthogonal construct, anxiety/boredom, for consumer search and purchasing behavior in online and traditional media environments. Our research vehicle [16] is based on the works of Csikszentmihalyi [6], Trevino and Webster [18], Davis [7], and Novak and Hoffman [13]. It studies the relationships between the feeling of flow, perceived usefulness and ease of use of 3 There are also some other related standards, e.g. Wireless Telephony Application Interface (WTAI) to support call control and network text messaging.
the system, the feeling of control, skills at using the Web, perceived challenges, learning, focused attention, navigation, as well as actual purchasing behavior. To see which of the causal relationships are true and in which contexts, it is of vital importance to succesfully measure the webflow and its antecedents and consequences in empirical studies. We tested the research model in a laboratory setting with a small sample of 23 individuals, in which they used the mobile application with a software emulator for about 10 minutes and then ranked their use experience in a 9question survey.4 Many of the respondents were information systems professionals or students. Purchasing behavior was excluded from this experiment, because no such data was available through this application. Rank correlations (Spearman's rho) with 5% significance level are utilized here to describe this qualitative data (expressions of feelings). Four fairly strong correlations were found in this experiment (see solid lines in Fig. 2). Both usefulness and navigation were correlated with webflow (ρusefulness,webflow=0,741; ρnavigation,webflow=0,698), and these were also correlated with each other (ρusefulness,navigation=0,674). In addition to these, learning and challenges were correlated (ρlearning,challenges=0,601), and a fair positive correlation was found between challenges and usefulness (ρchallenges,usefulness=0,578).
Learning
Challenges
Usefulness Webflow Navigation
Fig. 2. Correlations with webflow. Many other fair positive correlations were also found. Feeling of control correlated with navigation and webflow, and attention focus correlated with 4 The respondents ranked their use experience in nine questions with seven ranks ranging from full disagreement to full agreement: (1) This application makes me learn new things. (2) I feel totally focused, when I am using this application. (3) I am skilled at using the Web. (4) I enjoy the challenge using this application. (5) I often feel uncertainty when using this application. (6) I feel that this application is easy to use. (7) In my opinion, this application is a well designed Web application. (8) Using this application is enjoyable. (9) It is enjoyable to navigate in this application.
learning, usefulness and webflow. On the other hand, it was somewhat surprising that no correlation was found between skills in using the Web and usefulness (ρskills,usefulness=-0,013). In fact, skills did not correlate in a notable way with any other variable. This may be explained by the fact that most respondents considered themselves as highly skilled Web users, and very little variation existed among the ranks of their individually perceived skills. Another surprise was that ease of use did not correlate with the other variables. Because the respondents were not very familiar with mobile applications, they perhaps did not even expect the system to be very easy to use (or conventional). However, an alternative explanation seems to be more feasible. Satisfaction in navigational capabilities is one of the key variables explaining webflow. The findings can be summarized in the following way. Information technology facilities help consumers learn new things. This provides them with new challenges, and higher challenges mean that consumers perceive the system useful, which causes webflow. On the other hand, fluent navigation causes webflow as well. It may well also be that the user’s feeling of being in control over the system in use causes webflow and helps in fluent navigation. Similarly, learning may help focus the attention, which may make users perceive the system useful and cause webflow. In the future, it will be interesting to test whether an increase in weflow will lead to increased purchasing.
Three key design principles (conjectures) are introduced here based on extensive research on hypertext/hypermedia. 1.
Web information systems should be designed as mobile aware. The idea of a system's awareness of its potential mobile access and usage becomes fundamental from the viewpoint of mobility. The issue here is not data transfer, but the requirements that for example small handheld computers, different user interfaces and slower transfer rates set for the design. The Web is in principle platform and location independent, i.e. accessible on any device anywhere in many different ways, but in practice its services are designed for certain desktop systems assuming a relatively large screen, both mouse and keyboard for input and much faster connections compared to wireless systems. Mobile aware systems must differentiate the services for mobile terminals.
2.
Mobile aware Web information systems should be designed as hypertext information systems. An essential feature of the Web as a new competitive marketing paradigm is the fact that it is a hypertext/hypermedia communication environment [8, 9], even though current stores on the Web have yet to take advantage of many of the interactive features of hypermedia [11, 17]. The core idea behind the human-centered hypertext approach is to allow flexible structuring and navigation of a number of small but related information units by all users. This helps overcome one of the key restrictions of mobile terminals, namely the relatively small amount of data that can be presented on a single display. By hypertext nodes, links and other techniques, i.e. by viewing the Web as a hypermedia communication environment, mobile information systems can be designed more adequately to utilize the full potential of the media.
3.
The development of mobile aware Web information systems should be carried out through developing rich Web information systems. Since mobile terminals are restricted in many ways compared to their Web counterparts, only relevant information should be presented on the displays. Irrelevant information must be filtered out, which will also enable representation of personalized information. This provision of ‘right information at the right time in the right way’ may facilitate increased use experiences, and it may be achieved through more advanced facilities, e.g. annotations, typed nodes and links, and navigational features built on top of them [2].
3. General Design Principles for Mobile Electronic Commerce When developing mobile e-commerce applications, a lot of attention should be given to usefulness and navigation as shown in the previous chapter. While usefulness is mainly a strategic matter, navigation is a matter of systems design. Thus, sound principles, methods, techniques and tools for developing user navigation and multi-level interactivity of the environment are needed. Mobile aware Web information systems allow for new innovative ways of utilizing information and communication technology. While information and communication technologies evolve very fast, the potential of mobile applications should not be considered only with the limitations of the current wireless devices in mind. Thus, general design principles are needed instead of technology-specific ones. Because navigation in mobile applications is rather goal-oriented than open-ended browsing, design emphasis should shift from supporting the browsing of casual shoppers to customers with identified shopping requirements, who should not be required to perform exhaustive traversal of the various store organizations.
Due to the restrictions of mobile terminals the risks of getting lost in the hyperspace and suffering from cognitive overhead [5] may be even greater than with the Web. For this reason, proper techniques for mobile e-commerce systems must be developed. These include trimmed links, rich links, maps and guided tours.5 ◊
Trimmed links target precise product feature instead of only referring to the vendors home page and letting the consumer to find his or her way to the desired piece of information. This is a fundamental matter in contents creation.
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Rich links support orientation and effective navigation through their metadata that is stored in the link attributes [14, 15]. Even though products are often grouped to promote purchasing behavior as opposed to grouping by attributes [1], in mobile systems users could express preferences about product attributes to help them navigate through the network of information.
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Maps improve spatial and temporal context and reduce disorientation in a hypertext network by showing the structure of information in a graphical manner. They can also apply the rich link approach to tailor the overviews appropriately and automatically. Global maps help obtain an overall picture, and local maps help obtain a fine-grained picture of the local neighborhood of the information focus.
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Guided tours are associative networks or trails through information (see e.g. [16] for further discussion on this). Authors can prepare multiple recommended paths, or even readers may wish to share these with others. Guided tours may focus on different aspects or they may be tailored to the needs of different readers. Continuity and guidance distinguish guided tours from random links in documents. A guided tour should be clearly marked so that users will know which links keep to the tour and which are detours from it. The designer of the guided tour could filter out links, making only the ones most relevant to the current item available as detours. In some cases guided tours restrict users to the tours, prohibiting detours, and the information viewed during the guided tour will have links off the tour dimmed or hidden, which means that users have to suspend or exit the tour to access these. Or guided tours could contain branches allowing the reader to pick one sub-tour over another.
5
There are also many other techniques for customer interaction and feedback, e.g. short messages and FAQ lists.
Adaptive hypermedia [4] provides an interesting sub-approach for developing mobile e-commerce systems. It involves combining hypermedia systems and user-model based interfaces to adapt the content to the user’s goals, skills and knowledge, as well as to the user's terminal. These systems offer cues for straightforward navigation and conceptualization of the hyperspace by presenting the information, which is relevant to the user’s task in a compact form, which is relatively easy to understand, and may even suggest the most relevant links to follow. A structured model of the subject domain and a means to collect and store user preferences for each individual user are needed to develop adaptive hypermedia systems. Adaptation takes place by connecting user parameters to the subject domain model. This can happen either through different defined user profiles or by dynamic adaptation through user behavior during the session, adapting both the content and the navigation support of the system, leaving only the essential information for executing a specified task visible. Separation of concepts and their representations is necessary to offer different ways of representing the same information in different environments or when adapted to the task at hand. The design impact of adaptation can be discussed at technical, conceptual as well as organizational levels. The technical level includes primarily terminal capabilities, such as transmission rates and display properties. The conceptual level includes e.g. user profiles and tasks at hand. The organizational level includes, e.g. paying extra attention to organizational actors and roles, and workflow guidance. On the other hand, new wireless technologies combined with positioning systems open new possibilities with regard to contextual and situation specific information systems. The new information and communication technologies are often described as location independent ("friction free"), but taking a step further and making the systems location aware may be of great importance in dynamic user modeling and adaptive hypermedia in the future.
4. Conclusions This paper has examined mobile electronic commerce through the Web. It seems to be that this opens up great business and marketing opportunities to companies. At the moment, the provision of mobile electronic commerce facilities of any kind may help differentiate a company’s products or services, and early starters may benefit from being alert through sales or customer attitudes. While other companies will probably follow them before long, the provision of these kinds of services will not be enough. They need to be well designed, implemented and marketed, as well. The research experiment carried out here suggests that usefulness and fluent navigation predict a positive use experience in mobile e-commerce. While
usefulness is mainly a strategic matter, navigation is a matter of systems design. Thus, sound principles, methods, techniques and tools for developing user navigation and multi-level interactivity of the environment are needed. The focus of e-commerce support will probably shift from supporting the browsing of casual shoppers to customers with identified shopping requirements. The following general design principles should be regarded when developing Web-based mobile e-commerce systems: 1. Web information systems should be designed as mobile aware. 2. Mobile aware Web information systems should be designed as hypertext information systems. 3. The development of mobile aware Web information systems should be carried out through developing rich Web information systems. Navigational techniques for mobile e-commerce systems include e.g. trimmed links, rich links, guided tours, and maps. Utilization of adaptive hypermedia is a promising approach for developing these systems. The development of mobile applications will also bring to light many new design problems. The comparability of products, which has been suggested as the advantage of the Web compared to other retail formats, such as in-store, catalog or cable-TV shopping [17], may become even more difficult with mobile terminals than with the Web. New solutions for this are needed. The need for information intermediaries/brokers may increase. Many other research issues remain open, e.g. the role of push marketing in the future. The research voyage into mobile electronic commerce needs to be continued. We plan to conduct several constructive and empirical studies in the field of mobile electronic commerce. In the VRFlow research project,6 we aim to study the effects of different information technology solutions on user flow experience, and their effect on consumer purchasing behavior. In the future, it will also be interesting to apply hypermedia to ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, and other emerging virtual reality technologies.
Acknowledgements I wish to thank the National Technology Agency of Finland and the industrial enterprises funding this research, as well as researchers Kabir Quazi, Henri Kivelä, Samu Kallio, Toni Alatalo, and Timo Mäntyvaara for their helpful comments in preparing this paper.
6 This project belongs to VIRGIN (Virtual Reality and Hypermedia in Future Telecommunication Products and Services) research group at the University of Oulu, and to a larger collection of projects known as Mobile Forum Oulu.
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