A Novel End-User-Oriented Perspective for Mobile Service Artefacts: Conceptualizing Usage Patterns

Mobile apps have become the norm in affluent and non-affluent societies across the developed and developing worlds. Consumers’ desire for the latest feature-rich mobile services pushes e-commerce and Internet firms to constantly improve their mobile app artefacts. Accordingly, in this research, we study how end-user orientations affect the usage patterns of mobile services related to different service categories and how these usage patterns affect end-user cognitive engagement. We conceptualized a novel end-user-oriented research model to understand these usage patterns with support from extant literature and self-determination theory. Our research examined informative content, entertainment, location-based, and transaction-based mobile service categories. We adapted existing scales in the survey, collected data from smartphone users, and conducted SEM to test hypotheses. Our novel findings suggest that the end-user-oriented variable, defined as personal innovativeness in mobile artefacts, is crucial in determining usage patterns for all types of mobile services. Also, consumption of different mobile service categories shows different end-user cognitive engagement effects. Our study offers significant theoretical contributions and practical implications for e-commerce and Internet firms.