Intrusiveness VS Awareness: Laying The Groundwork For Presenting Offers To Customers With AR In A Retail Environment

Sammanfattning: The term Augmented Reality (AR) was first coined back in 1968. Research on the subject would then for decades remain largely focused on technical aspects of the phenomenon. At the time, little to no attention was paid to the potential user audience or what would later be known as Human-Computer Interaction theory. Some previous studies have touched upon user satisfaction of general AR interfaces, but most studies that cover the topic of indoor navigation with AR tend to focus on technical solutions. Few try to establish any kind of visual language or research what visual interfaces are most intuitive, effective and user friendly. Consequently, this thesis investigates how to visually seek the attention of the user to present offers in an AR application for smartphones meant to be used to navigate an indoor retail environment. It does so by conducting a user study in a real retail store in Stockholm, Sweden, where participants completed three laps around a certain part of the store using an AR indoor navigation application. For every lap, each participant tried out one of three different versions of the application. These three versions varied in how intrusive the presentation of offers was to the customer’s experience with the application. The participants filled in a Likert scale questionnaire for each of the three versions, as well as answered some more open-ended questions at the end of every test session. The conclusion is that a balanced approach to intrusiveness is the wisest in order to make customers aware of discounts around them while not considerably annoying them. The most positively received approach presented an offer promptly to the user, but did not take up too much screen space or force the user to take any action towards it. Future studies could investigate whether there is a higher tolerance for visual intrusion among customers if the discount is considered big or very personally relevant. Subsequent studies could also use high-end AR head-mounted displays that might be more prominently used by everyday consumers in the future.