M-business and organizational behavior applying behavioral theory ideas to mobile interface design

Abstract

Just ten years ago programming interfaces were built according to technological possibilities. Search results had to be displayed as textual lists, due to a lack of graphical support. Later, when searching for a music album, search results could be enhanced by showing the cover to simplify recognition. Today, mobile devices are mainly used in private contexts (e.g. on the IPhone), corporate use, like Blackberry devices, is just emerging. Whether the same principles apply for corporate as well as private us is questionable, therefore insight from behavioral theory might aid in deriving corporate mobile interfaces by combining these insights and existing approaches from private use. Special attention is given to mobile information visualization. Behavioral Theory has been developed and evaluated for over sixty years. Its main ideas evolve around bounded rationality of the people, decision making processes and conflicting interests. As these are main themes in the offline business world, members of an organization cannot abandon them using mobile devices in the online world. Therefore, taking organizational considerations into account, mobile interface design might be improved. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.