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Main results and conclusions

Operational Service Deployment and Platform Exploitation
Business Models
Usability

Operational Service Deployment and Platform Exploitation

The validation revealed that authorities have serious interests in the provision of mobile service, mainly from the perspective of multi-channel service delivery, prioritizing the enlarged and instant access to already existing services. Other advantages such as a positive impact on work organisation and increased efficiency in service provision are also perceived, but are not necessarily the main driver for mobile services provision. The general positive attitude towards the potential of mobile services is also confirmed by the consideration of these services in the strategic plans for e-services of the respective organisations. This is further matched by the interest that a representative number of interviewed citizens manifested to have in mobile services provided by public administration.

There is also a real interest in the sharing of resources and even joint service provision. In fact, the possible motivations seem to be at hand (cost efficiency, financial capability and handling of technical complexity), however, these have not been investigated further by the validation activities. For IST and e-services in general, and mobile services in particular, the underlying concepts of infra-structure sharing and joined provision of services must be pursued further.

Authorities, however, do also perceive some serious constraints: about half of the authorities see either legislative / regulator barriers for mobile service provision in general or simply procedural obstacles when it comes to institutional cooperation. These aspects must be properly addressed at the political and regulatory level. The fact that the reorganisation of administrative processes is not in itself a driver for e-services is an identified adoption barrier.

On the other hand, there is some contradiction between the identified potential for service efficiency and the general perception (and possibly psychological barrier) that the inclusion of the mobile channel into the service portfolio would result in an increase in the need for technical and human resources. Already from this point of view, the advantages of organisational networking and true integration of e-services into administrative processes should be particularly addressed by governmental policy makers.

Business Models

Summarising all results of the business model validation it can be stated that:
- Advertising is not very well accepted esp. from the non-citizen side, but possible as financial support for the service and should therefore be chosen with controlled content and frequency. Sponsoring might be an option for the very sceptic countries.
- Payment by citizens is more accepted by citizens than by non-citizen. This shows that the citizen do not always expect to get services for free especially if the service provides a real added value for them.
- In general, there are more pessimistic views from authorities on options like advertisement and payment. Before excluding such financial support and – even worse - not providing the service, interviews with citizens to evaluate the real acceptance should be made.
- Mobile operator costs are named as very high for some countries. Mobile operators should rethink their pricing policy to foster the take-up of mobile services in the respective countries. They might also actively pursue special public-private-partnership offers for authorities for the sake of citizens, authorities and of course the private market.
- Citizens in most countries prefer to get more such services from their government. A sharing of services between esp. smaller authorities can financially support them and such enable more mobile services. In contrary to that, 50 % of all interviewed citizens do not think that such service will be successful / accepted due to country specific habits.
- Payment by phone bill and pay per call is preferred by all.

Usability

Comparing most usability variables in such different applications with different user profiles (country, gender, and experience) has not a high degree of relevance. Usability tests and activities are focused on generating recommendations for application improvement. Nevertheless some common problems and solutions can be summarized after analysing all this devices in all those different user groups and situations.

The level of usability was not homogenous between applications; there were some of them with clearly more problems than others (health care application, and non expert user group from the City Information Broadcasting Service).
Some general usability problems also arose from most tests. A help section was missed by the users, at least on their first interaction.

There were significant translation and naming problems throughout the applications. On mostly text based interactions that occur in these types of applications, labelling and translation should be taken with significant care.

Another basic problem for users on these types of devices is to understand clearly the order of tasks and steps inside tasks. Therefore link order is paramount (i.e. if we put the registration page link after the log in page link, it should be expected that a significant number of users will try to log in without registering).

On these mobile applications, the learning curve is very important. Therefore the first tasks should be very simple to execute (i.e. registration), more complex tasks and interaction should be presented after a certain degree of experience is already acquired by the user.
One should remember that the percentage of inexperienced users on mobile applications is still very low, and that the convergence of experience from a desktop web application to a mobile web application is very doubtful if not almost irrelevant.

Text insertion by users is also very problematic in these types of devices, therefore it is recommended that text insertion is kept to a minimum, (i.e. don’t make users digitize URL’s use shortcuts, links or favourites).
Language throughout these applications should be kept very simple and to the point, of the action taking place. This is especially important on these devices where screen real estate is premium, as these devices have very small screens, and space for content and functionality is very limited.