Usability in M-commerce : Critical factors to consider when adapting m-commerce

Abstract: The electronic commerce is a phenomenon that has developed rapidly during recent years and has come to take larger part in the everyday life. The act of buying and selling products online is referred to as electronic commerce and today, this phenomenon is starting to take more space within the mobile devices which is called mobile commerce. The user no longer has to visit physical stores in order to make a purchase, it can now all be done from a device in the palm of the hand. The aim with this research was to describe what the driving factors of m-commerce are from a usability perspective and how important different usability factors are to the customer when performing mobile commerce. This particular thesis was conducted with a quantitative approach in order to gain information about the consumer behavior when shopping through mobile phone as well as finding the most critical usability factors from the users point of view. The result was a self-completion questionnaire with a total of 200 respondents. The results from the self-completion questionnaire points out that there are numerous critical factors that can have an impact on the users’ decision whether to perform mobile commerce or not. Furthermore, the results from the questionnaire pictures that most of the consumers still prefer to shop in physical stores followed by shopping online through the computer. The reason why other methods before using the smartphone to make a purchase was chosen, was mainly because of the limited screen size and input mechanisms on the mobile phones. The result also shows that the majority of the participants would cancel their purchase if usability factors, like errors and poor site performance, are not thoroughly considered in the application. This shows the importance of including usability in the developing of applications and mobile websites. This essay will provide companies and developers with important information that is needed for creating applications for mobile commerce with high user satisfaction. M-commerce is a rapid growing field of study which is important to research because of the impact it begins to have on business. For further research it would be interesting to continue the study of other factors that plays a big role when developing mobile applications for m-commerce. Security is one key issue in m-commerce and according to our empirical result it is of big importance for the users performing m-commerce and should be investigated deeper.