Projects
Social Issues in New Commerce
Over the last several years eCommerce has been rapidly transforming in response to the adoption of mobile and social technologies. Specifically, I draw attention to the expanding authority of social networking sites and mobile phone market penetration as prime triggers to this development. This new form of commerce leverages the mass adoption of mobility for real-time access to information, resources and tools that before was only available in a stationary environment. New commerce such as social commerce (sCommerce), mobile commerce (mCommerce), and mobile payment services (MPS), have begun to impact not only developed nations economies (ex. Canada, United States, Europe), but also developing nation’s economies around the world (eg. Kenya, India).
Some new forms of commerce are on the verge of becoming key dominating players within the eCommerce sphere – and some already are. Yet, we still know little about their users and how/if their needs are being supported. This dissertation presents three studies, which explore new commerce users in an effort to identify their social behaviours, activities and routines. Informed from these social issues, the overarching goal is to create design suggestions through empirically supported guidelines and to understand if these new commerce systems have advantages over the more traditional ones.
Key Publications in this project:
Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., Pang, C., and Oduor, E. (2013)
“Shared Joy is Double Joy”: The Social Practices of User Networks Within Group Shopping Sites
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, 10 pgs.
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Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., Bowes, J., and Antle, A. (2012)
Soft Trust and mCommerce Shopping Behaviors
Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services (MobileHCI 2012).
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Usability Defender Video Game
December 2010
This paper describes an application, in the form of an educational video game, created for beginner web designers, online marketers, webmasters or any new web publisher with the goal of introducing the basic principles of web usability in a fun way. The game is based on the classic arcade game Galaga (1981) and all educational information originates from Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s research on usability located at useit.com. The application is located in the online portal UsabilityDefender.com.
Keywords: web usability, educational video game, Jakob Nielsen
Game Screen Shots
Start!
Win!
Lose!
