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the user was a common concern of our test us-
ers. Tsai et al. (2009) found in their user study of
a location-sharing application that giving users
feedback of who was requesting their location
data, improved users' comfort level and allayed
privacy concerns. As the users get increasingly
dependent on mobile services, the reliability of
the technology and conveying information about
reliability to the user become more important.
In the Technology Acceptance Model for
Mobile Services, trust is defined according to
Fogg and Tseng (1999). Trust is an indicator of a
positive belief about the perceived reliability of,
dependability of, and confidence in a person, object
or process. User trust in mobile services includes
perceived reliability of the technology and the
service provider, reliance on the service in planned
usage situations, and the user's confidence that
(s)he can keep the service under control and that
the service will not misuse his/her personal data.
Perceived ease of adoption is related to taking
the services into use. In the original TAM settings
with information systems at work, this certainly
was not an issue as users typically got their appli-
cations ready installed. In our field trials it turned
out that a major obstacle in adopting commercial
mobile services was the users' unawareness of
available services, as well as problems anticipated
in taking services into use (Kaasinen, 2005b).
Furthermore, as usage needs were typically quite
occasional, people often did not have enough
motivation to find out about these issues. And
finally, configuration and personalization seemed
to require almost overwhelming effort (Kaasinen,
2005b). Introducing the services to users would
definitely require more attention in service design
(Kaasinen et al., 2002).
As mobile services are typically used oc-
casionally and some services may be available
only locally in certain usage environments, ease
of taking the services into use becomes even more
important. The user should easily get information
about available services and should be able to
install and start to use the services easily. Finally,
(s)he should be able to get rid of unnecessary
services. The context may also impact on user
acceptance as found by Mallat et al. (2009) in
their studies of mobile ticketing.
Compared with the original TAM (Davis,
1989), the Technology Acceptance Model for Mo-
bile Services includes an additional phase between
the intention to use and the actual usage behavior.
Taking a service into use may constitute a major
gap hindering the transition from usage intention
to actual usage (Kaasinen, 2005b). Perceived ease
of adoption is added to the model at the stage when
the user's attention shifts from intention to use to
actually taking the service into use.
In the following, the Technology Acceptance
Model for Mobile Services is analyzed further
and design implications are briefly presented for
each user acceptance factor. A more thorough
description of the design implications is given in
an earlier publication (Kaasinen, 2008).
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
The Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile
Services includes four main acceptance factors:
perceived value, perceived ease of use, trust and
perceived ease of adoption. How these factors are
actually realized in individual mobile services
depends on the service in question. However,
there are many attributes of the acceptance fac-
tors that repeat from one service to another. These
attributes form a set of design guidelines that can
be used in the design of mobile services. The
guidelines can additionally be used in designing
user acceptance evaluations to define the issues
to be studied in the evaluation. In the following,
the design implications of each user acceptance
factor are briefly described.
Perceived value of mobile services is not based
on featurism - having more and more features in
the service. Instead, the key values that the service
is supposed to bring to the end users, service pro-
viders or other stakeholders should be identified.
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