Management and design of persuasive smart services: the case of United Arab Emirates.

Abstract

Smart services are advocated to enable institutions to provide a not only continuous, but also ubiquitous support to their users, with the aim to reduce the time and effort required from both parties from the establishment to the finalizing of any transaction. Nonetheless, the adoption of Smart Services could face different obstacles including those related to infrastructure, legislations, usability when accessed through mobile phones and the lack of standardization. Furthermore, one of the main obstacles relates to users perceptions of smart services, their ease of use as well as the usefulness. On the other hand, in order to change people behaviour and attitude, such services can be designed to embed certain persuasive techniques and would need to be introduced in a way that makes them accepted by present and potential users. Consequently, this thesis addresses this problem and proposes design principles and processes for augmenting smart services with persuasive elements, and also for the introduction of such services in a way that take full advantage of the motivation of the anticipated users. Nonetheless, motivation and persuasion can be significantly affected by the socio-cultural framework of the users, therefore the thesis focused on the UAE as a hosting environment. In addition, e-government smart services are the main domain of applications to investigate in this thesis. As a matter of fact, the thesis is built on two main models: - Fogg’s eight steps process for designing persuasive technology - Technology Acceptance Model and proposes amendments. Additionally, the thesis is adding additional considerations to the two different models based on the investigation and the data analysis that took place during the study. Moreover, the thesis followed an empirical approach and involved key stakeholders, including present users as well as experts from various domains that are linked either directly or indirectly to the topic of discussion, through a series of empirical studies. As a result, the proposed process and design principles were validated with key informant and, accordingly, it was concluded that the proposal is both valid and useful for supporting the decision making and process of designing and introduction of smart service in a persuasive and motivational style.