Touch to access the Mobile Internet

This paper presents findings from a series of field trials, where Near Field Communication (NFC) tags were used for providing users an access to Mobile Internet content with NFC enabled mobile phones in a city setting. The field trials were arranged in the city of Oulu at the end of year 2007. Use statistics and user experience were collected from more than 180 users who used NFC enabled mobile phones to access Mobile Internet content by touching NFC tags embedded in the environment. The findings indicate that the users found the touch-based mobile content access easy to use. However, details such as the placement of the tags or static/dynamic nature of the content had a clear impact on the user behaviour and perceived quality. Based on these findings, we have identified a set of design principles that work as guidelines for the designers and researchers developing NFC applications