Abstract
Mobile shopping applications for smartphones are popular among consumers. While mobile commerce research has focused on experimental prototypes and evaluation in small groups, only little is known about the real-world usage of these applications. Established tools and methods for analysis are missing. In this paper, we present the usage analysis of a mobile bargain finder application based on server logs of more than 98,000 users over a period of 6 months. We show that plots of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) are well suited to analyze the distribution of relevant parameters and present simple heuristics to identify active users. We can show that Pareto’s law applies to the distribution of user requests. We also propose metrics to measure usage focus and find that active users tend to become more focused with increased usage. Finally, we combine the results from the log analysis with demographics from an online user survey.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Asthana, A., Crauatts, M., Krzyzanowski, P.: An indoor wireless system for personalized shopping assistance. In: IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 69–74 (1994)
Böhmer, M., Hecht, B., Schöning, J., Krüger, A., Bauer, G.: Falling asleep with angry birds, facebook and kindle: a large scale study on mobile application usage. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI 2011, pp. 47–56. ACM, New York (2011)
Brodersen, A., Scellato, S., Wattenhofer, M.: Youtube around the world: geographic popularity of videos (2012)
Deng, L., Cox, L.P.: Livecompare: grocery bargain hunting through participatory sensing. In: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, HotMobile 2009, pp. 4:1–4:6. ACM, New York (2009)
Fano, A.E.: Shopper’s eye: using location-based filtering for a shopping agent in the physical world. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents, AGENTS 1998, pp. 416–421. ACM, New York (1998)
Geron, G.: Mobile shopping assistant usage analysis - analysis of comparis smartshopper iPhone application. Master Thesis, ETH Zürich (2011)
Kamvar, M., Kellar, M., Patel, R., Xu, Y.: Computers and iphones and mobile phones, oh my!: a logs-based comparison of search users on different devices. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2009, pp. 801–810. ACM, New York (2009)
Karpischek, S., Geron, G., Michahelles, F.: Towards a better understanding of mobile shopping assistants - a large scale usage analysis of a mobile bargain finder application. In: Second Workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp 2011, Beijing, China, September 18 (2011)
Kotlyar, V., Viveros, M., Duri, S.S., Lawrence, R.D., Almási, G.S.: A Case Study in Information Delivery to Mass Retail Markets. In: Bench-Capon, T., Soda, G., Tjoa, A.M. (eds.) DEXA 1999. LNCS, vol. 1677, pp. 842–851. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Kourouthanassis, P., Roussos, G.: Developing consumer-friendly pervasive retail systems. IEEE Pervasive Computing 2(2), 32–39 (2003)
McMillan, D., Morrison, A., Brown, O., Hall, M., Chalmers, M.: Further into the Wild: Running Worldwide Trials of Mobile Systems. In: Floréen, P., Krüger, A., Spasojevic, M. (eds.) Pervasive 2010. LNCS, vol. 6030, pp. 210–227. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Miluzzo, E., Lane, N.D., Lu, H., Campbell, A.T.: Research in the app store era: Experiences from the cenceme app deployment on the iphone. In: First Workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 26 (2010)
Roussos, G., Kourouthanasis, P., Moussouri, T.: Designing appliances for mobile commerce and retailtainment. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 7, 203–209 (2003)
Shannon, C.E.: A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Systems Technical Journal 27, 623–656 (1948)
Shekar, S., Nair, P., Helal, A.S.: iGrocer: a ubiquitous and pervasive smart grocery shopping system. In: Proceedings of the, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2003, pp. 645–652. ACM, New York (2003)
Silverstein, C., Marais, H., Henzinger, M., Moricz, M.: Analysis of a very large web search engine query log. SIGIR Forum 33, 6–12 (1999)
Yu, H., Zheng, D., Zhao, B.Y., Zheng, W.: Understanding user behavior in large-scale video-on-demand systems (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Karpischek, S., Santani, D., Michahelles, F. (2012). Usage Analysis of a Mobile Bargain Finder Application. In: Huemer, C., Lops, P. (eds) E-Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2012. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 123. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32273-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32273-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32272-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32273-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)