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Young People’s Views of Municipality Websites: Use, Attitudes, and Perception of Quality

This research investigated public sector websites in Norway by focusing on municipalities. Norway consists of 422 municipalities each of which has its own website. As investments in eGovernment continue to grow, this study highlights young people’s perceptions of these municipality websites. Young adults are a key user group for future digital services, and an online survey with Norwegian undergraduate students reveals important insights. Findings show that young adults rarely use municipality websites, mainly visiting them to find specific information or access digital services. They prefer digital communication methods, especially email and chat, over face-to-face or paper-based interactions. Participants rated the quality of municipality websites as moderate to good, though not exceptionally high. This study is published at International Conference on Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective.

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The relationship between young consumers’ decision-making styles and propensity to shop clothing online with a smartphone

Consumer behavior in retail is changing due to the adoption of technologies such as the internet and the smartphone. This study, published in Procedia Computer Science, focuses on studying the relationship between young consumers’ decision-making styles and their propensity to shop clothing online with a smartphone. Using the Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) as a foundation, a survey of young adults identified four key factors; brand consciousness, fashion consciousness, impulsiveness, and recreational shopping behavior, that strongly correlate with the frequency of browsing and purchasing clothing online through smartphone. These findings are important for retailers aiming to increase revenue through mobile shopping solutions.

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What’s the “Thing” in Internet of Things (IoT) in Grocery Shopping? A Customer Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology presents an opportunity for retail groceries to develop an infrastructure that makes physical things such as mobile phone, shopping basket, store shelves, digital display, and, even the product itself smart, allowing real-time interaction with customers both in the physical store and in the virtual store. This study explores how IoT can enhance value in retail grocery choice situations. To analyze IoT’s impact on consumer decisions, we conducted a conjoint experiment where participants purchased fresh salmon in a grocery store. The results demonstrated that compared to static information on price, expiry date, quality, and general offers, real-time information was the most influential factor. Moreover, quality ratings from other customers had the strongest effect, followed by personalized offers based on cart items, real-time expiry dates, and real-time pricing. The full study can be found in Procedia Computer Science.

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Situational Factors Influencing Customers’ Credit Use Online: A Behavioral Economic Approach

This study, published in the Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, looks at how consumers use credit online, especially when choosing between practical (utilitarian) and enjoyable (hedonic) products. In a simulated shopping experiment with Norwegian university students, participants could either save money to buy a product later or buy it on credit for immediate access. Participants were split into two groups: one saw personalized credit information, and the other did not. Results show that as the wait time increased, people were more likely to buy on credit instead of saving. This behavior matched a pattern called hyperbolic discounting. Also, participants were more willing to use credit for enjoyable products than practical ones. Personalized credit details had a small effect, but findings suggest this could matter more with enjoyable products. This study highlights factors that influence online credit use and points to areas for further research.

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Persuasive technology

Sanchit Pawar gives a presentation at The Behavior Bar the 12th of October 2017. His talk is on Persuasive technology, a topic which is part of research in the Behavioral Lab at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology. Persuasive technology is broadly defined as technology designed to facilitate behavioral change. It is based on the principles of human-computer interaction and experimental methodologies. It shares several core features with behavioral science. In order to effectively utilize technology for behavioral change, we propose that the influence of technology can be better understood from a behavior-analytic perspective. Show up and listen to this groundbreaking topic within human-computer interaction.

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Design of Digital Products in the Future

A paper titled “Design of Digital Products in the Future: A Study of Interaction Design Students and Their Perceptions on Design Issues” by Hanne Sørum was presented at the conference HCI International 2017 in Vancouver, Canada,  9-14 July 2017. Today’s students on programs covering interaction design will most likely contribute to the development of products that we will use in the future. The roles they will play in this regard will of course depend on various factors. Regardless of this, their educational background is a vital component, along with their motivation, personality, knowledge, and ideas. The present study reports on an online questionnaire (n = 82) given to students on interaction design programs. Additionally, eight qualitative interviews were performed to gain more insight. The findings show that, in general, the students of today perceive themselves to be in great shape for the development of future products. However, the majority of the respondents have also considered other study areas that might be relevant to them, grounded in shared backgrounds and interests. They also enjoy working individually with design ideas and prototypes, and they generally prefer working with digital solutions over working with print and physical products. User testing is found to be a vital element within the design process, although the analysis of such  data  is  found  to  be  somewhat  difficult. Concerning  industrial  needs,  the students struggle to clearly define the role of an interaction designer and the tasks they are expected to perform when taking on a job within the design industry. This paper ends with concluding remarks and suggestions for upcoming research contributions.

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Consumers´ credit use

The consumer credit use project has gained a lot of attention. From the lens of behavioral economics, we investigates consumers´ choice between saving and credit use. Understanding of consumers’ credit use is of vital importance as well as for the responsible policy-makes, credit card companies, researchers, as for the individual credit users. This research is done by Asle Fagerstrøm (Westerdals Oslo ACT, Norway), Donald Hantula (Temple University, US) and Lars Sydnes (Westerdals Oslo ACT). Our research is published in The Psychological Records and has been mentioned in Forskning.no, Aftenposten, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation).

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That personal profile image might jeopardize your rental opportunity!

This study aims to investigate the impact of a seller’s facial image and their expression upon buyers’ behavior in on Airbnb. The impact of facial expressions was investigated together with other relevant variables (price and customer ratings). Findings show that the impact of a seller’s facial expression on buying behavior in an online peer-to-peer context is significant. A negative facial expression and absence of facial image (head silhouette) abates approach and evokes avoidance tendencies to explore a specific web page on Airbnb, and, simultaneously decrease the likelihood to rent. The reverse effect was true for neutral and positive facial expressions. We found that a negative and positive facial expression had more impact on likelihood to rent, for women than for men. Further analysis shows that the absence of facial image and an angry facial expression cannot be compensated for by a low price and top customer ratings related to likelihood to rent. The study published in Computers in Human Behavior and is presented at ScienceNordic, Forskning.no, and Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.

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Wi-Fi services get high priority when booking hotels

Our research on the impact of Wi-Fi service on consumers´ hotel booking online is presented in ScienceNordic. The study aim to expand understanding of the relative importance of Wi-Fi when consumers book hotel rooms online.When looking only at Wi- Fi, results show that previous guests’ Wi-Fi reviews have a higher impact on booking than Wi-Fi price. Further analysis shows that Wi-Fi can be a “deal breaker” in a competitive and/or undifferentiated market. We propose that the impact of Wi-Fi can be understood as rule-governed behavior. Consequently, behavioral understanding of the impact of Wi-Fi could aid hotel managers in developing more effective marketing strategies. The study is done by Niklas Eriksson (Arcada University of Applied Sciences) and Asle Fagerstrøm (Westerdals Oslo ACT), and is published in Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research