An investigation of factors that influence user intention to use location based mobile applications

There is an increasing number of mobile applications that cover a variety of usage areas, and there is a reality that most of these applications are going cumbersome after a short time of usage. In order to investigate success factors for mobile applications, we tried to elaborate location based mobile applications which (LBMA) is one of the prominent mobile application categories. Conducting one to one interviews using two actively used mobile applications, we have had the ability to reach insightful ideas about certain characteristics that has impact over customer intention. While one of the mobile applications we elaborated was directly related with customers´ usage of location, the other one was indirectly related. Our interview responses have lead us to seperate the value that affects the users´ intention to two: “functional value” and “emotional value”. When we look at these two value categories, functional value constitutes the big proportion in affecting the intention. According to our findings, while the most prominent determinants of functional value are usefulness and ease of use (EoU), task-technology fit (TTF) and minimum memory load concepts were found to be the most important independent determinants in creating the functional value. Awareness, which has a moderate affect on functional value, is found to have a signicant impact, as well. On the other hand, enjoyment is found to be an important variable in creating the emotional value.