Design and Initial Evaluation of a Ubiquitous Touch-Based Remote Grocery Shopping Process

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC) are promising technologies to build a ubiquitous "Internet of things" and related forms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We present here a ubiquitous touchbased remote grocery shopping process fitting well with some RFID's and NFC's peculiar benefits and favourable characteristics. We have designed and implemented a ubiquitous software system prototype to test this process with an explicit focus on customers' touch-based interaction. We have evaluated the performance of our process in an initial user study conducted on a limited and heterogeneous group of 25 potential customers. All users, including those who considered themeselves as "nonexpert", were able to complete the shopping of a randomly chosen list of 3 RFID tagged items with an NFC phone. Average completion time was around 40 seconds and the tag reading error rate due to any real condition (e.g. noise, interference, orientation) was low. Moreover, 70% of users qualitatively assessed the perceived ease of use of the touch-based interaction mode as high. Finally, a comparative analysis with a simplified Web-based grocery shopping test that the group of customers was also asked to complete seems to confirm the promise and viability of our touch-based process in ubiquitous NFC enabled systems. © 2009 IEEE.