NFC Application Design Guidelines

In order to enable companies to respond to these challenges, this chapter introduces a set of guidelines to design future NFC applications with a high user acceptance in consumer markets. A set of nonfunctional requirements and design guidelines are derived from four case studies conducted by the authors (Koene et al., 2010; Resatsch, 2010). They are meant to outline the positive and negative factors related to user acceptance of NFC-based ubiquitous computing artifacts in four example domains. Furthermore, the guidelines are exemplarily applied to the development of the NFriendConnector application in a prototype study. The NFriendConnector prototype is a peer-to-peer NFC application that enables seamless integration of users’ online social interactions with their online social networks using a mobile phone. It allows users to instantaneously initiate and establish Facebook social ties using their mobile phones without having to incur any additional search cost. We considered the nonfunctional requirements and design guidelines in the conceptual design and development of the NFriendConnector prototype. The requirements and guidelines were interrelated to design rationales applicable for the NFriendConnector application. The application of the design guidelines in the development process of the NFriendConnector prototype allowed for a very high user acceptance of the application, as evidenced in a medium-scale laboratory experiment, despite employing NFC technology that was novel to participants.