Techreport,
Personal Service Environments - Openness and User Control in User-Service Interaction
(2001)
Abstract
This thesis describes my work with making the whole experience of using electronic services more pleasant and practical. More and more people use electronic services in their daily life – be it services for communicating with colleagues or family members, web-based bookstores, or network-based games for entertainment. However, electronic services in general are more difficult to use than they would have to be. They are limited in how and when users can access them. Services do not collaborate despite obvious advantages to their users, and they put the integrity and privacy of their users at risk. In this thesis, I argue that there are structural reasons for these problems rather than problems with content or the technology per se. The focus when designing electronic services tends to be on the service providers or on the artifacts that are used for accessing the services. I present an approach that focus on the user instead, which is based on the concept of personal service environments. These provide a mobile locale for storing and running electronic services of individual users. This gives the user
