Mobile Design Guidelines in the Context of Retail Sales Support

Mobile technology is an inherent part of today’s private and professional life in the developed nations, with mobile telephony at the forefront. Optimization of business processes with mobile technology presents a topic of interest for enterprises for several years focusing primarily on the sales force and logistics (Wichmann & Stiehler, 2004). Though still rare in practice, by supporting the duties of the retail sales staff in their daily personal sales activities, mobile technology is assumed to generate added value in the retail context for customers, sales staff and shop owners as well. Individual innovative companies still test these techniques, for example the METRO Group with its “Future Store Initiative”. But, also in a broader context and independently of today’s enormous diffusion of mobile technology, mobile design still remains an area of active research. In this regard, employing mobile devices for the retail sales support at the point of sale was a subject in the research project IntExMa, “Interactive Expert System for Made-to-measure Clothing” at Fulda University of Applied Sciences. In doing so, usability was regarded as a fundamental quality criteria. Many standards, guidelines and scientific papers document the existing usability knowledge in the field of HCI. While this expertise has predominantly evolved in the desktop computer domain over a period of several decades, interface design for mobile services is still regarded to be “in its infancy” (USE-ME.GOV, 2004). Yet, only a few scientific and hardly any generally accepted guides for mobile interface design exist. These are naturally not based on such a broad basis of experiences than in the desktop domain. Gong & Tarasewich propose a range of usability guidelines for the mobile devices domain (Gong & Tarasewich, 2004). They start from Shneidermans & Plaisants eight “Golden Rules”, implicitly termed desktop-oriented, and base them on their own and other research findings. Many other studies concentrate exclusively on the optimized display of web pages on handheld devices, e.g. (Karkkainen & Laarni, 2002). The two major companies offering operating systems for handhelds, Palm Source and Microsoft, have each published their own more or less product specific guidelines (see below).