Ingvar Tjøstheim

Combination of Information Sources in Travel Planning A Cross-national Study

This paper presents results from a study about the Internet as an information source for travel planning based on interviews with travelers in 13 countries in 2005. In 1997, a similar large scale survey was carried out in 15 European countries. The study shows a dramatic but well known change in information sources used by travelers since 1997. The Internet has become the most preferred information source by approximately 50% of the travelers. Travelers using the Internet as their primary source of information mostly combine it with other sources such as friends and relatives, brochures, guidebooks, and travel agents. A logistic regression analysis was performed in order to study the significance of demographics and countries on the preference of Internet as the first information source.

Mobile Devices as Substitute or Supplement to Traditional Information Sources: City Tourists, Mobile Guides and GPS navigation

New mobile phones and navigation devices are very powerful. In this paper an ethnographic approach is used to gain insight in how one of these devices, a multimedia-phone with GPS, maps and a mobile guide is used by visitors to the city of Philadelphia. An interesting finding is that some of the visitors seem to substitute traditional information sources with the navigation and map-tool on the mobile device. Also, the study documents point of capture archiving of personal experiences by use of a mobile multimedia device.

Increasing Trust Perceptions in the Internet of Things

When interacting with objects and services in the Internet of Things, people will need to trust that their data is safe, and that “things” will do what they promise they will do. As part of a user evaluation of a toolkit for providing security and privacy information to users, we created two models to find a pattern in changes in the perception of trust in the participants. The model based on demographics was not very descriptive. But, the model based on participants’ privacy concerns and trust traits revealed a good match between changes in trust based on information from our toolkit. While there were some limitations in the current study, it showed how TFT can be improved for future evaluations.

The role of emotion and enjoyment for QoE — A case study of a science centre installation

We performed a user evaluation in a science centre to uncover the impact of emotion and enjoyment on the perceived Quality of Experience. In an evaluation with 60 students, we assessed data from the use of an installation and relate Positive And Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales and other subjective and objective data using the partial least square methodology. We present interpretations for how participants, winners, and losers of a quiz game in the science centre experience their visit.