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Thorsten Bohnenberger, Anthony Jameson, Antonio Krüger, Andreas Butz
Location-Aware Shopping Assistance: Evaluation of a Decision-Theoretic Approach
Proceedings of the Mobile HCI 2002 symposium, ISBN 978-3-540-44189-2, Pisa 18-20 September 2002, Springer LNCS series 2002

We have implemented and tested a PDA-based system that gives a shopper directions through a shopping mall on the basis of (a) the types of prod- ucts that the shopper has expressed an interest in, (b) the shopper's current location, and (c) the purchases that the shopper has made so far. The system uses decision-theoretic planning to compute a policy that optimizes the expected utility of a shopper's walk through the shopping mall, taking into account uncertainty about (a) whether the shopper will actually find a suitable product in a given location and (b) the time required for each purchase. To assess the acceptability of this approach to potential users, on two floors of a building we constructed a mockup of a shopping mall with 15 stores. Each of 20 subjects in our study shopped twice in the mall, once using our system and once using a paper map. The subjects completed their tasks significantly more effectively using the PDA-based shopping guide, and they showed a clear preference for it. They also yielded numerous specific ideas about the conditions under which the guide will be useful and about ways of increasing its usability.