Towards a transition to tangible commerce

Ubiquitous computing technologies disclose new means for consumer product designs that allow products to adapt their behaviour and in particular communication to consumer needs and to interact with other products. In this sense, products become smart. Dialogues between products and consumers require new communicative product interfaces. Because unprecedented, we investigate an implementation of a dialogue-based product interface that is virtually bound to a product via a mobile recommendation agent (MRA) on a PDA and thus reuses knowledge learned by mobile applications. The dialog system of the MRA is tested with the system usability scale (SUS) for a global assessment of its usability to obtain product information (N=47). This preliminary study resulted in promising SUS scores as well as valuable qualitative feedback for future work.