Using mobility as a conceptual framework for informing the design of mobile ICT for construction professionals

Developing a mobile reporting system for road maintenance

“…For instance, Mitchell et al [9] discuss the challenges of applying IT technology to the construction domain, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.…”

“…The number of studies concentrating on user centric design of such mobile applications has been very limited. End-user perspective has been investigated in [9] and [14], but instead of focusing on the development aspects of the mobile solution, they concentrate on the user acceptance of the applications. In our study, we have taken a participatory design approach and report how user centric design has been implemented through the whole design process.…”

“…However, developing such a supporting mobile application for the road maintenance domain is challenging, as the field is rather specific and the target users typically lack earlier experience on tools applying mobile communication technology. Without properly understanding the end-user needs it is easy to create a solution that which with a brief look is perfectly adequate but which fails to get customer acceptance [9]. The role of user research in the development is thus important both in finding out the needed features and in optimizing their usability.…”

Experiences in Applying a Mobile Service Platform Across Different Business Domains

“…Other researchers have studied mobile field force applications in different domains. For instance, [7] discuss the challenges of applying IT technology to the construction domain. [11] analyzes the use of a mobile solution by healthcare workers.…”

“…E.g. [7] indicate that without properly understanding the end-user needs it is easy to create a solution that on the surface is perfectly adequate but which fails to get customer acceptance. In comparison to office applications the need for customer involvement in field force solutions is even bigger since few developers have direct hands-on experience with field-force work.…”