M-Commerce Usability: An Explorative Study on Turkish Private Shopping Apps and Mobile Sites

There's a growing interest towards mobile commerce in recent years. This pilot study, which is the first step of an extensive long-term research, investigated mobile usability in mobile "private shopping" applications. Focusing on three different private shopping applications / mobile sites in Turkey, a qualitative mobile usability test, based on a multi-method approach, was carried out with a sample of 11 Turkish senior year university students, who were experienced mobile Internet users and potential customers of private shopping platforms. The participants were observed during the task executions and additional data was collected by the "think aloud" procedure, eye-tracking and video recording of the participants. A short debriefing interview was also made to gain a detailed insight into the user experience. The findings revealed significant mobile usability problems and enabled to propose guidelines to improve user experience in mobile private shopping.