The advance of mobile phone devices and wireless communication have dramatically change the way individuals do for their personal lives and businesses. Nowadays, people can not only talk with their peers located at different places, they can also get the desired information ubiquitously. Business strategies that are based on simple mobile phones have to be adapted to a complex mobile business ecosystem. The mobile phone market in Guatemala has almost saturated, and the mobile operators have to come up with creative ideas to increase their revenues. This thesis explores what the user¡¦s intentions toward mobile services in Guatemala. Understanding users¡¦ intension will allow entrepreneurs to create new business strategies that would fill an existing void that exists on the Guatemalan mobile market.

Mobile devices are becoming widely common today. As the number of mobile devices continue to grow all around the world, its functionality is extending and mobile technologies are gaining more popularity in every aspect of our life. Today, wide range of mobile services is offered to people. The purpose of our study is examining the customer value of mobile services for individuals or citizens. A value model for mobile services has been proposed with five dimensions: Functional Value, Social Value, Emotional Value, Epistemic Value and Economic Value. The effect on each value dimension on Intention to Use (ITU) is aimed to be determined. A survey instrument for mobile Internet services and short message services (SMS) has been developed to validate the proposed model. After assuring the reliability of instrument with a pilot study, data was collected from 303 people working in information and communication technologies (ICT) sector in Turkey. For analyzing proposed model variance-based structural equation modeling (partial least squares) was used. Before evaluating model, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to indentify underlying constructs. Based on EFA results, Functional Value was found to have sub-dimensions namely: Ubiquity Value, Performance Value and Security Value. The measurement model was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The structural model was analyzed using predictive power. For both mobile Internet and SMS, moderate predictive power has been gathered. Finally, the effect of each value dimension on intention to use (ITU) has been evaluated. Ubiquity Value, Performance Value and Epistemic Value have significant effect on ITU for mobile Internet. On the other hand, Economic Value and Performance Value have significant effect on ITU The indications of this research will be valuable for providing information about customer value of current mobile services.

There are two main purposes of this thesis. The first one is to get a better understanding of the aspects affecting customers’ loyalty in the telecommunication industry, in the context of when customers are using the services. The second purpose is to look into what the case company gains by having customers that are more loyal, where the degree of loyalty is measured by the Net Promoter Score metric. The methodology used to carry out the research is a case study with an approach that is both qualitative and quantitative. Where the quantitative approach has the largest share. Two datasets have been used in this thesis, one collected by the authors by sending out surveys and one collected beforehand at the case company. The survey created by the authors aim to let customers assess the satisfaction level with technical and non-technical aspects that can affect loyalty. The dataset that is already collected by the case company document the initial degree of loyalty of customers along with the revenue per customers over a period of years. The two datasets are used for the two different research purposes respectively. The statistical analysis for the data is conducted using the statistical tool Minitab. The findings for the first purpose are that our survey questions can be split into three categories using factor analysis. The categories are Perceived mobile multimedia quality, Perceived broadband multimedia quality and General perceptions. The first two categories are driving customer loyalty and the third category are indicators of customer loyalty. For the second purpose the findings are that the case company has different gains of more loyal customers depending on if the customers are either mobile or broadband customers. More loyal mobile customers stay longer as customers and also buy more. More loyal broadband customers only stay longer as customers. The practical implications of the findings are that the case company has to think of customer loyalty in new ways. There are more indicators of if a customer is loyal than the Net Promoter Score, these are for example customer satisfaction, perceived brand value, perceived overall quality, perceived customization etc. Therefore it would be better to measure customer loyalty not only with the Net Promoter Score Metric but to pick out 2-3 indicators to ask the customer and create an average index for all the questions that can represent the customers’ loyalty. Furthermore there are not a specific variable that drives customer loyalty more or less, several aspects are acting together in two high level groups. Another practical implication is that the gains of more loyal customers are higher for mobile customers since they buy more from the case company and stay longer as customers. However, for broadband customers, they only stay longer. Therefore the Net Promoter Score is not as useful to track for broadband customers. Either the broadband customers should have more opportunities to buy more or another metric should be used for broadband customers.

Este trabalho apresenta uma análise a respeito das restrições técnicas e comportamentais que dificultam a disseminação dos serviços móveis, tais como portais WAP. A análise foca na restrição relacionada à usabilidade das aplicações. Considerando que há um consenso de que a adaptação das aplicações móveis, em função de variáveis de contexto como: perfil do usuário, ambiente de uso e características do terminal e da rede, é uma possível solução para melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações, analisam-se estas técnicas, concentrando-se na Modelagem do Usuário (MU) como mecanismo para a adaptação e personalização. Pretende-se analisar e testar em que medida esta abordagem de adaptação venha a melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações móveis. Propõe-se teste de serviço móvel, baseado em uma página WAP, implementada com técnicas que permitam a adaptação. Este serviço permitirá acesso às informações de trâmites e pendências de processos burocráticos da Superintendência Regional do INCRA no Rio Grande do Sul. / This paper presents an analysis about the technical and behavioural restrictions that hinder the dissemination of mobile services, such as WAP portals. The analysis focuses on the restriction related to the usability of applications. Whereas there is a consensus that the adjustment of mobile applications depending on context, user profile, environment of conditions and use the network, characteristics a possible solution to improve the usability of these applications is to analyse these techniques focusing on modeling the User as a mechanism for adaptation and customization. The aim is to examine and test if this approach to adaptation improve the usability of these mobile applications. It is proposed to test mobile service, based on a WAP page, implemented with techniques that allow the adjustment. This service will provide access to the information and outstanding manner of bureaucratic processes of the Superintendência Regional do INCRA in Rio Grande do Sul.

Este trabalho apresenta uma análise a respeito das restrições técnicas e comportamentais que dificultam a disseminação dos serviços móveis, tais como portais WAP. A análise foca na restrição relacionada à usabilidade das aplicações. Considerando que há um consenso de que a adaptação das aplicações móveis, em função de variáveis de contexto como: perfil do usuário, ambiente de uso e características do terminal e da rede, é uma possível solução para melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações, analisam-se estas técnicas, concentrando-se na Modelagem do Usuário (MU) como mecanismo para a adaptação e personalização. Pretende-se analisar e testar em que medida esta abordagem de adaptação venha a melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações móveis. Propõe-se teste de serviço móvel, baseado em uma página WAP, implementada com técnicas que permitam a adaptação. Este serviço permitirá acesso às informações de trâmites e pendências de processos burocráticos da Superintendência Regional do INCRA no Rio Grande do Sul. / This paper presents an analysis about the technical and behavioural restrictions that hinder the dissemination of mobile services, such as WAP portals. The analysis focuses on the restriction related to the usability of applications. Whereas there is a consensus that the adjustment of mobile applications depending on context, user profile, environment of conditions and use the network, characteristics a possible solution to improve the usability of these applications is to analyse these techniques focusing on modeling the User as a mechanism for adaptation and customization. The aim is to examine and test if this approach to adaptation improve the usability of these mobile applications. It is proposed to test mobile service, based on a WAP page, implemented with techniques that allow the adjustment. This service will provide access to the information and outstanding manner of bureaucratic processes of the Superintendência Regional do INCRA in Rio Grande do Sul.

Este trabalho apresenta uma análise a respeito das restrições técnicas e comportamentais que dificultam a disseminação dos serviços móveis, tais como portais WAP. A análise foca na restrição relacionada à usabilidade das aplicações. Considerando que há um consenso de que a adaptação das aplicações móveis, em função de variáveis de contexto como: perfil do usuário, ambiente de uso e características do terminal e da rede, é uma possível solução para melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações, analisam-se estas técnicas, concentrando-se na Modelagem do Usuário (MU) como mecanismo para a adaptação e personalização. Pretende-se analisar e testar em que medida esta abordagem de adaptação venha a melhorar a usabilidade destas aplicações móveis. Propõe-se teste de serviço móvel, baseado em uma página WAP, implementada com técnicas que permitam a adaptação. Este serviço permitirá acesso às informações de trâmites e pendências de processos burocráticos da Superintendência Regional do INCRA no Rio Grande do Sul. / This paper presents an analysis about the technical and behavioural restrictions that hinder the dissemination of mobile services, such as WAP portals. The analysis focuses on the restriction related to the usability of applications. Whereas there is a consensus that the adjustment of mobile applications depending on context, user profile, environment of conditions and use the network, characteristics a possible solution to improve the usability of these applications is to analyse these techniques focusing on modeling the User as a mechanism for adaptation and customization. The aim is to examine and test if this approach to adaptation improve the usability of these mobile applications. It is proposed to test mobile service, based on a WAP page, implemented with techniques that allow the adjustment. This service will provide access to the information and outstanding manner of bureaucratic processes of the Superintendência Regional do INCRA in Rio Grande do Sul.

Abstract User experience has become a popular term in research and industry. There has been a great attempt to study and design user experiences. This thesis gives a practical view to user experience studies and methods by reporting test settings and results of the ADAMOS case studies. The goal of the ADAMOS project was to investigate context- and action-sensitive services in terms of how users experience when the system can detect one’s location and actions, and then adjust according to this information. The aim of this thesis is to investigate problems and issues in studying user experiences of mobile services and to find out in which conditions the study of user experience is possible and meaningful. As a contribution this thesis provides practical information for conducting user experience studies and evaluating experiences. The first contribution is a framework (U2E-Frame), which I created and improved iteratively in each test case. The framework is method-independent and it can be used for planning and conducting tests. The second contribution of the thesis is the practical view to all methods that are created, applied, presented and evaluated in this thesis. Especially during this thesis work three novel methods (Mobile Feedback, 3E-Diary and SUE methodology) have been developed and evaluated. The evaluation of the research methods illustrates that the best practice to study user experience is to use several methods together. This enables deeper understanding of user experiences. As the third contribution of this thesis I introduce a proposal of ten user experience heuristics for design and evaluation of user experiences. The aim of these heuristics is to enable designers to understand what meaning user experience has in product design. Developers can use these heuristics for designing and evaluating user experience aspects in product design. This thesis presents the main challenges in user experience research: know what to study (comprehensive user experience), know how to study it (find appropriate methods) and know how to evaluate and design it (user experience heuristics). An answer to the research problem is that it is both possible and meaningful to study user experience when we know user experience targets, and features of the services we want to investigate, and we can use the most appropriate methods, ensure the participant’s commitment to the test and ensure analysing relationships between results collected with different methods.

With the advent of powerful multimedia capable mobile phones, the market for mobile services is flourishing. Zenterio AB's Halfpipe Active Desktop is a complete distributed mobile service platform a with a powerful server and platform-independent client. The communication between the client and server takes place over a GPRS-capable mobile network. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a secure communications protocol for use between the Halfpipe Active Desktop client and server. This is done by determining requirements, analyzing candidate protocols and then by designing the final protocol. The result, the Halfpipe Active Channel protocol, is an authorized, encrypted, session oriented, message based and light weight protocol designed to minimize computational as well as network overhead. This master's thesis project was defined by and performed at Zenterio AB during the second half of 2004.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the mobile virtual operator market in the Czech Republic, regarding its development compared to abroad, and to identify the opportunities and threats in the Czech market. The first chapture describes the global development and future trends. The second chapter characterizes the development of Czech market of mobile services and important events preceding the entry of virtual operators. The third chapter focuses on analysis of Czech market compared to British, the mobile virtual operators are segmented and evaluated based on the potential for future success in the market. The opportunities and threats are identified through own qualitative research using the technique of focus group.

Nas ciências de computação, o estudo de emoções tem sido impulsionado pela construção de ambientes interativos, especialmente no contexto dos dispositivos móveis. Pesquisas envolvendo interação humano-robô têm explorado emoções para propiciar experiências naturais de interação com robôs sociais. Um dos aspectos a serem investigados é o das abordagens práticas que exploram mudanças na personalidade de um sistema artificial propiciadas por alterações em um estado emocional inferido do usuário. Neste trabalho, é proposto um ambiente para interação humano-robô baseado em emoções, reconhecidas por meio de análise de expressões faciais, para plataforma Android. Esse sistema consistiu em um agente virtual agregado a um aplicativo, o qual usou informação proveniente de um reconhecedor de emoções para adaptar sua estratégia de interação, alternando entre dois paradigmas discretos pré-definidos. Nos experimentos realizados, verificou-se que a abordagem proposta tende a produzir mais empatia do que uma condição controle, entretanto esse resultado foi observado somente em interações suficientemente longas. / In computer sciences, the development of interactive environments have motivated the study of emotions, especially on the context of mobile devices. Research in human-robot interaction have explored emotions to create natural experiences on interaction with social robots. A fertile aspect consist on practical approaches concerning changes on the personality of an artificial system caused by modifications on the users inferred emotional state. The present project proposes to develop, for Android platform, an environment for human-robot interaction based on emotions. A dedicated module will be responsible for recognizing emotions by analyzing facial expressions. This system consisted of a virtual agent aggregated to an application, which used information of the emotion recognizer to adapt its interaction strategy, alternating between two pre-defined discrete paradigms. In the experiments performed, it was found that the proposed approach tends to produce more empathy than a control condition, however this result was observed only in sufficiently long interactions.