Research has shown that product reviews on the Internet not only support consumers when shopping, but also lead to increased sales for retailers. Recent approaches successfully use smart phones to directly relate products (e.g. via barcode or RFID) to corresponding reviews, making these available to consumers on the go. However, it is unknown what modality (star ratings/text/video) users consider useful for creating reviews and using reviews on their mobile phone, and how the preferred modalities are different from those on the Web. To shed light on this we conduct two experiments, one of them in a quasi-realistic shopping environment. The results indicate that, in contrast to the known approaches, stars and pre-structured text blocks should be implemented on mobile phones rather than long texts and videos. Users prefer less and rather well-aggregated product information while on the go. This accounts both for entering and, surprisingly, also for using product reviews.

Customer reviews and recommendations for products are provided by almost all e-business platforms, supporting consumers when shopping on the web. Mobile and ubiquitous computing provide extended means to sense input data for recommendations and to make recommendations available for consumers when shopping in traditional stores. This work contributes a comprehensive design space that outlines design options for product recommendation systems using mobile and ubiquitous technologies. A visual notation for the design space is proposed, based on which existing systems are categorized. Blank spaces are identified and concrete possible extensions are proposed by the example of an existing mobile product recommendation system. Finally, general options for future research on product recommendation systems using UbiComp technologies are discussed.

This paper presents a concept that enables consumers to access and share product recommendations using their mobile phone. Based on a review of current product recommendation mechanisms it devises a concept called APriori. APriori leverages the potential of auto-ID-enabled mobile phones (barcode/RFID) to receive and submit product ratings. Since mobile users cannot be expected to have the patience and time to compose text-based reviews on mobile phones, we introduce a new rating concept that allows users to generate new rating criteria. The concept is tailored to the limited attention and input options of mobile users in real-world environment. This work describes the architecture, implementation, and evaluation of APriori. For an evaluation we have taken the approach of interviewing 26 users in the frames of a formative user study, with the goal to further improve the system for an application in the real world. In addition, the paper discusses open issues regarding community-based product recommendations on mobile phones and proposes solutions.