Acceptance and Use of Simple Mobile Services - Preliminary Results and Perspectives

Although Web Services have made the leap from the desktop to mobile devices, mobile services are still much less widely used than their desktop equivalents. The Simple Mobile Services (SMS) project proposes a new generation of services designed to overcome the limitations of the current offering. Here we describe 4 focus groups (1 in Germany, 1 in Greece and 2 in Italy) designed to investigate the user experience with currently available services and their expectations for the future. Key findings include very low use of current services, mainly because of high cost and poor ergonomics, strong acceptance of the SMS concept, strong concerns about reliability and privacy (particularly when services use location information), concerns about the de-humanizing aspects of new services (excess reliance on machine rather than face to face communication), and a strong preference for free services (financed by advertising and/or service providers).