An investigation of the impact of mobile phone and PDA interfaces on the usability of mobile-commerce applications

With the introduction of faster wireless networking standards opportunities arise to transport more e-commerce applications to wireless devices (hence, mobile, or m-commerce). The wireless device with which most people are familiar is the mobile phone. It is in the interests of commercial organizations for people to use their phones for m-commerce tasks. In addition, various handheld and pocket computer platforms have appeared in the market place with wireless connectivity ability (albeit via a mobile phone connection in many cases). Given the different capabilities of the various devices it is important to know whether applications can be developed to run on multiple mobile platforms with little or no platform-specific alteration. We describe a small pilot study to explore some usability and user perception issues of m-commerce across different applications and wireless device platforms. Factors such as task efficiency, user-error rate, user perception, memorability, and user workload were measured on two applications developed using J2ME running on two different wireless devices. The results indicated no significant differences in usability across platform type, thus supporting the notion that with frameworks such as J2ME single applications can be developed and deployed across multiple device platforms with little impact on usability or user perception. Some statistically significant differences were found in performance between the two applications.