The qualitative research with second year undergraduate students from a range of disciplines and universities, consisted of four focus groups and eight depth interviews, held in Manchester and London. The research was conducted by
FDS International on behalf of
Intute and the findings reinforce the motivation behind the work of the project, which is to provide a user friendly mobile site that is fast and inexpensive to load, providing the right content, presented in the right order and with an adapted layout.
The extent to which the
mobile Internet was used varied greatly, with only a small number of students using their
mobile Internet for academic work.
Given the cost and generally slow access to the Internet from mobile devices, primarily determined by the type of contract and the handset, most students only ever occasionally accessed the Internet using their mobile phone for social purposes and for short durations of time.
Consequently, the ones most likely regular to access the internet on their mobile phones possessed new telephones with large screens, and had a contract which included free internet access. These represented only a small fraction of those interviewed.
Despite the fact that students rarely used the
mobile Internet for their university course, many stated that they would if:
- Their mobile phones had larger screens.
- It was quick and easy to load and navigate websites.
- It was cheaper or free (included in their contract) to access the Internet.
