Personalization of Mobile Services

Abstract

The mobile era is well established and the number of smartphone users is showing exponential growth. The capability of smartphones and enabling technologies is also increasing and has opened many possibilities of personalized mobile services. The goal of personalization is to support the user by providing the right service at the rightmoment. Early focus of personalization was on content adaptations in different information systems. The new approaches of personalization are still needed for mobileservices as it is a compelling feature of mobile communication systems for both endusers and service providers.Personalization is providing a means of fulfilling users’ needs more effectively andefficiently and, consequently increasing users’ satisfaction. By providing successfulpersonalization, a high degree of user satisfaction and a pleasant user experience can beachieved. Some features of personalization can cause problems and may outweigh thebenefits of personalization.This thesis has focused on how to achieve scrutable mobile client-side personalizationwhile keeping the user’s privacy. The issue of privacy in personalization of mobileservices can be reduced by shifting the control of their personal information towards theusers. Our research goal is to understand and improve the personalization process anddevelop an architecture for scrutable mobile client-side personalization while keepingthe user s’ privacy. Moreover, there is a need to develop an evaluation framework tomeasure the effectiveness of mobile services personalization. A design science researchmethodology is adopted in this research work. More particular contributions of thethesis are as follows:

C1: Identifications of the research issues and challenges in personalization of mobileservices.

C2: An approach for delivering personalized mobile services.

C3: Development of mobile client-side personalization architecture.

C4: Development of mobile services Personalization Evaluation Model.

C5: Identification of the prospects of scrutable personalization of mobile services.