A user study of mobile web services and applications from the 2008 Beijing Oympics

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a business user study using a packaged suite of mobile Web services and applications deployed at a real-time event, the Beijing Olympic Games in August 2008. These applications were an Olympics guide, menu reader, phrasebook, Sports Tracker [3], photo sharing on Ovi [4], and Nokia Maps [2]. To evaluate its feasibility and use, we used logging, surveys, and statistical analysis for collecting and analyzing the data. We discovered that guests found the Olympics guide application to be the most popular, followed by Nokia Maps and then photo sharing on Ovi. The results demonstrate that the techniques used in our evaluation can be used to determine the type of applications that are relevant to consumers at a real-time event, and suggests ways for improving the mobile application design and user experience.

REFERENCES

• 1: Yanqing Cui , Virpi Roto, How people use the web on mobile devices, Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, April 21-25, 2008, Beijing, China [doi>10.1145/1367497.1367619]
• 2: Nokia. Nokia Maps. http://maps.nokia.com, 2008.
• 3: Nokia. Nokia Sports Tracker. http://sportstracker.nokia.com, 2008.
• 4: Nokia. Ovi photo sharing service. http://share.ovi.com, 2008.
• 5: A. Sellen and R. Murphy. The future of the mobile internet: Lessons from looking at web use. Hewlett-Packard Labs Technical Report, HPL-2002-230, 2002.
• 6: Toshihiko Yamakami, Towards Know-When Technology in the Mobile Information Space: Long-Term User Trace Log Analysis in the Mobile Internet, Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence, p.545, October 13-17, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
mobile design, mobile interface, mobile web application, usage, user experience, user study