A study on smartphone applications : on hospitality and healthcare industries in Singapore

This report studies the factors, namely features of application, charges and risks affecting consumers’ intention to use smartphone applications in two industries – hospitality and healthcare. A total of 10 hypotheses were developed. Data was gathered using computer-assisted surveys and group self-administered surveys where probability sampling was used. A total of 85 responses were gathered for the healthcare survey while the hospitality survey had 81 respondents after removing the outliers or incomplete surveys. With the cleaned data, we carried out t-tests and ANOVA to test the relationships between the variables. The analysis yielded results that coincides with our hypotheses of applications with additional features (location based, organizational, monitoring, convenience) being more attractive to users. There were also unexpected results from tests of gender differences for the intention to use certain applications showing no significant gender difference and also relatively moderate aversion towards substantial risk like UI impersonation. The analysis of results from our study is supported with qualitative feedback from respondents which will largely aid managers/marketers to better understand consumers’ behavior. Due to the short span of time and resource constrains which threaten the reliability and validity of the data. As such, we would recommend future researchers to carry out focus group for more in-depth discussions especially in the areas of what features will contribute to a more attractive application for users. In the hospitality industry, applications with location-based features are found to be more effective. Generally, reputable hotels, tourist attraction sites, government statutory boards from the hospitality industry and public transport providers are recommended to create smartphone applications with unlimited data usage. As for the healthcare industry, applications with convenience features are more popular for those from 18-24 while organizational and monitoring features will be more beneficial for the middle-aged.BUSINES