Students and the Mobile Internet

One strand of the Intute Mobile Internet Detective project has been to engage with student users:

• to provide user data to allow a full development of the proposed service in a way which is aligned to student user needs;

• to discover the user requirements for the Mobile Internet Detective with a view to designing a technical specification for a prototype tool.

The qualitative research with second year undergraduate students from a range of disciplines and universities, consisted of four focus groups and eight depth interviews, held in Manchester and London. The research was conducted by FDS International on behalf of Intute and the findings reinforce the motivation behind the work of the project, which is to provide a user friendly mobile site that is fast and inexpensive to load, providing the right content, presented in the right order and with an adapted layout.

Information Literacy

Overall it was clear from across the focus groups and depth interviews that students received low quality training on using the Internet for academic research, with most guidance limited to using on-line university library resources and a broad introduction on how to use search engines. Students also explained how tutors typically suggest the types of resources students should either rely on or avoid, but often these resources were limited in their range of information.

Use of the Mobile Internet

The extent to which the mobile Internet was used varied greatly, with only a small number of students using their mobile Internet for academic work. Given the cost and generally slow access to the Internet from mobile devices, primarily determined by the type of contract and the handset, most students only ever occasionally accessed the Internet using their mobile phone for social purposes and for short durations of time. Consequently, those most likely regularly to access the internet on their mobile phones possessed new telephones with large screens, and had a contract which included free internet access. These represented only a small fraction of those interviewed.

Despite the fact that students rarely used the mobile Internet for their university course, many stated that they would if:

• their phones had larger screens;
• it was quick and easy to load and navigate websites; and
• it was cheaper or free (included in their contract) to access the Internet.

At present, however, use of the mobile Internet was felt to be fraught with difficulties. One of the main drawbacks of using the mobile Internet included the lack of compatibility of websites with mobile phones. Students explained that unless a website had a WAP version, like the BBC for example, then the layout of site would be rearranged, making it difficult to view the content clearly and easily navigate the site.

Furthermore, the time it takes for various mobile phones to access and load websites was also a prohibitive factor in making more regular use of the mobile Internet. For example students explained that getting access to websites took so long that it became frustrating, not to mention rather expensive. In addition the layout and manner of browsing made it difficult for some students, since the time taken to load one page and then to scroll or skip to another made it frustrating and used up a lot of time to navigate around a site. A couple of participants explained how it could take between 5-10 minutes just to get access to their university email account.

With regards to access and usage of the mobile Internet, students stated that it was primarily dependent upon the type of mobile handset. Those with smaller screens found that some websites could not be viewed properly as the text or pictures were so small and generally found navigation ‘fiddly’; whereas those with larger screens could view websites properly and were more likely to use the Internet.

The expense of accessing the Internet on a mobile phone was also a key consideration. For those with a monthly contract mobile cost was less of an issue, though there were often limits on how much could be downloaded during a day. For those on PAYG contracts the cost varied from daily flat charges of 30p-£1.00 to being charged by the minute.

Handsets

We have estimated that most students had handsets that had been purchased within the last 18 months; furthermore, the depth interviews suggest that students are likely to change their handsets every 18 months or so as well. In purchasing new handsets, students referred to wanting the latest technology, i.e. touch screen, as well as greater music capacity and good quality built-in cameras. More importantly students referred to wanting bigger screens and better Internet capability, in conjunction with cost-effective contracts to use the Internet.

Tutorial Content

At the start of the project Intute recognised that the existing tutorial content would need a radical rewrite for effective use on a handheld device, and the user feedback we have received has been invaluable in this work, including suggestions about:

• Audience
• Duration of the tutorial
• Functionality and layout of the tutorial
• Quality of the content

There were clear recommendations for the tutorial to recognise differences in user groups and be adaptable to suit changing user needs. The depth and scope of the current tutorial is important for first-time visitors to the website and in particular for novice internet researchers, such as high school or first year university students. But for more experienced internet users and penultimate or final year university students, a Mobile Internet Detective would need to summarise much of the information, since it is clear the website would need to meet changes in their needs from a comprehensive tutorial to wanting an accessible reference guide or checklist.

Tags: endUser, JISC, JISCRI, MOBILEDET, progressPosts, rapidInnovation, userCase

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Mobile Internet Detective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.