A user study of mobile web services and applications from the 2008 Beijing Oympics

This paper describes a business user study using a packaged suite of mobile Web services and applications deployed at a real-time event, the Beijing Olympic Games in August 2008. These applications were an Olympics guide, menu reader, phrasebook, Sports Tracker [3], photo sharing on Ovi [4], and Nokia Maps [2]. To evaluate its feasibility and use, we used logging, surveys, and statistical analysis for collecting and analyzing the data. We discovered that guests found the Olympics guide application to be the most popular, followed by Nokia Maps and then photo sharing on Ovi. The results demonstrate that the techniques used in our evaluation can be used to determine the type of applications that are relevant to consumers at a real-time event, and suggests ways for improving the mobile application design and user experience.