Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Web navigation taxonomies are ill suited to the
mobile context.
Sohn, Li, Griswold, and Hollan (2008) also
explored mobile informational needs and how
they were addressed. Of special interest here,
they asked how (if at all) the mobile Web changed
informational needs and behavior. They found that,
in using the mobile Web, people were better able
to meet their informational needs by themselves,
and used somewhat clever strategies to do so,
but ultimately felt that the mobile Web was not
sufficient for meeting their informational needs.
Dearman, Kellar, and Truong (2008) looked
more broadly at general information needs and
found that people often have highly context-
sensitive information needs that require assistance
from individuals in their social network. Through
a diary study, they categorized all information
needs into nine primary categories: Persons,
Establishments and Organizations, Offerings,
Events, Environmental Conditions, Trivia and
Pop Culture, Finding, Availability, and Guidance.
Often people's social network is not broad enough
to include the right people in the right situations or
circumstances who can satisfy context-sensitive
information needs in a timely manner. The mobile
information channel might help offset those gaps.
Chigona, Kankwenda, and Manjoo (2008)
enlist the uses and gratifications (U&G) frame-
work to understand the motivations and extract
the intrinsic needs of mobile phone users in South
Africa; they derive three categories of motiva-
tions: Content, Process, and Social. The study
found the U&G's of the mobile internet are an
intersection of the U&G's of the mobile phone
and traditional Internet.
Kellar, Watters, and Inkpen (2007), identified
six information tasks in
non-mobile
Web-based
activities: browsing, communications, fact find-
ing, information gathering, maintenance, and
transactions. Our results support refining and ex-
tending this basic scheme to describe
mobile
Web
usage, and can be compared to the findings of Cui
and Roto (2008). Based on a large multi-method
study, Cui and Roto constructed a taxonomy of
mobile Web use focused on “activities.” In their
taxonomy, which also builds on Kellar et al. and
other earlier work, they posit four main categories
of activity: information seeking (for knowledge
or entertainment), communication, transactions,
and personal space extension.
Information seek-
ing
includes fact-finding, information gathering
(not common in their study), and casual browsing.
Communication
includes e-mail (in which they
saw primarily monitoring rather than sending or
replying) and activity in online communities. In
transactions
, they saw a small amount of activity
but found most of it postponed for stationary Web
or phone use. Finally,
personal space extension
entailed maintaining content objects online for
personal access.
They identify four contextual factors: spatial,
temporal, social, and access. Concerning the
spatial factor, they found (as we did) that the mo-
bile Web was also used from stationary sites (for
example, at home, instead of using an available
home computer). Regarding the temporal factor,
they also found that mobile use was tucked into
free moments in the day (the “micro-break”).
Concerning the social factor, their findings agree
with ours that mobile Web use occurs both when
people are alone and when they are with a group.
Our study differs in that it distinguishes between
motivations and behaviors in activities, and does
not specifically address e-mail behavior, but their
findings are largely consistent with ours.
Studies of Adoption
Wang and Wang (2010) defined a model for user
acceptance of mobile Internet based on the Unified
Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology.
The study identified the primary adoption factors:
Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, So-
cial Influence, Perceived Playfulness, Perceived
Value, Palm Sized Computer Self-efficacy. The
most significant areas of friction impeding mobile
Internet adoption were performance expectancy
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