Personalisation in mobile information services

Publikations-Art

Kongressbeitrag

Autoren

Frank Köhne, Carsten Totz

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Veröffentlicht in

The BITA/B4U Workshop on Business Models

Tagungsort

TU Delft, Netherlands

From a vendor´s point of view, eCommerce can facilitate new models of division of labour, which typically encompass a higher level of involvement on the customer´s, specifically consumer´s, end. In order to overcome shortcomings of computer-mediated communications, numerous individualization or personalization features have been added to eCommerce applications. In the telecommunication industry, as one prominent example, increasingly self-service portals have been established which provide administrative functions such as a check of billing status, change of tariff or billing address. More advanced features like unified messaging are even more customer specific and are beneficial inasmuch as they are regularly adapted to the individual, situation specific needs. However, in contrast to vendor´s expectations, these features have not been well received and adopted by customers so far (e.g. Yahoo´s personalization features). In a first round of empirical enquiry, we have conducted several focus group analyses combined with usability tests with mobile phone users, which showed two major shortcomings: firstly, many functions were not known at all and, secondly, the usability of the Web portal was very limited. These findings must be quite troubling for the vendors as ongoing innovations in the telecommunications industry are leading to a need for even more user involvement: e.g. location based services require adaptable and regularly updated consumer profiles in order to provide satisfying results. Hence, in a second round of empirical enquiry, we have conducted experiments based on a prototype for a location based service: "A Pub Finder", i.e. a profile based context-sensitive recommender system. The experiments tested two different interfaces and interaction designs for the configuration (or personalization) of the system, the "Wizard" and the "Selection Parameter Set". The experiments yielded initial insights into drivers for the acceptance of location based services and requirements for the personalization process. <br>The paper will report on findings about the acceptance of the Prosumer role, analyse and frame the trend towards increasing user participation in advanced elecommunication services and discuss design options for customer interaction in a personalization environment.