smart card technology: awareness and satisfaction

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Smart Card Technology; Awareness andSatisfaction

Hamed Taherdoost, Shamsul Sahibuddin and Neda Jalaliyoon

Abstract —Smart cards are becoming an important part in the daily life around the world. One of the important concerns of the

smart card service/product suppliers are their customers’ satisfaction. Previous studies have proposed that awareness is one of

the main components to gain the customer satisfaction. New technology should be clearly introduced to people and they have

to be aware of its characteristics, features, and benefits. The main goal of this research is to assess the influence of user

awareness on smart card technology satisfaction and consequently on its usage. In order to achieve the purpose of this study, a

survey was conducted among the 688 university students who have more knowledge regarding the smart card or similar

technologies compared to others. Research findings prove that user awareness have an effect on user satisfaction of smart

card technology both significantly and directly.

Index Terms —Smart card, satisfaction, awareness, technology acceptance, adoption, information technology.

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1 INTRODUCTION

mart cards are continuously introduced into differentareas of life around the globe. Smart card is a stan-dard-sized plastic card that contains an integrated

circuit or chip which gives the card the ability to storeand/ or process data [15][10]. A smart card is characte-rized uniquely by its chip, with its ability to store muchmore data than is held on a magnetic stripe, all within anextremely secure environment, with the physical charac-teristics defined in the ISO norm 7810 [7] and the record-ing techniques in the ISO norm 7811 [8][9].

There is various application of smart cards intrusion intoour lives such as finances, telecommunications, healthcare, mass transit systems and contactless smart cards,loyalty programs, identification and security, studentcards and government [14]. To various degrees, all appl i-cations can benefit from the added features and securitythat smart cards provide. Smart cards have been appl iedto a variety of functions, including the identification ofthe cardholder; the authentication of card-holder's au-thority to conduct a transaction, the transaction itself andthe data representing the transaction; the encryption anddecryption of messages; data storage and data [5].

Among the fast growing usage of new technologies,smart card technology has an outstanding growth andmaking its way worldwide into the hands and wallets ofeveryone [12]. According to [11] one of the factors thatcould effect on technology acceptance is awareness so i t isunderstood that for successfully implementation of smartcard technology, awareness should be addressed. In otherwords, in order to increase the level of smart card usageand user satisfaction, the emphasis on aspects that mayaffect on user acceptance should be raised [13]. Aware-

ness can effect on user satisfaction and consequently onuser acceptance of smart card technology [11], as a result,to be able to increase the user awareness of smart cardtechnology, first, the user awareness should be examined.This paper is going to investigate the user awareness ofsmart card technology and assess its influence on smartcard satisfaction. Therefore, in the following a brief dis-cussion on awareness dimension is prepared. Further-more we outline our empirical assessment introducingthe applied methodology and presenting our main re-

sults.

2 WARENESS COMPONENTS

Smart card implementation must be clear to the users orcardholders, or at least it has minimal impact on them.Technology should be introduced to people and theyhave to be aware of its characteristics, features, and ad-vantages. Also user awareness is a key to act againstfraud and identity theft. The users need to understandwhat the card is doing; sometimes users do not knowhow they should use their cards and even what the ad-

vantages of using them are, and how they can benefitusers. Obviously, different applications involve differentusers’ behavior so they should be aware of the usage andappli cation of smart cards [13].[16] defined awareness as the information of computingenvironment characteristics that are needed to performadaptations. Adaptive applications are not only i nterestedin their own awareness information, but also the aware-ness of their peers. They [16] also summarized the typesof awareness which includes user awareness, applicationawareness, network awareness, device awareness andenvironment awareness. User awareness measure theuser’s high level expectations of a service by specifying

their preferences [10].As said by [11], awareness is defi ned as “ the degree towhich an indiv idual are aware about the technology” .Awareness about technology reason and motivate users

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H amed Taherdoost i s wi th t he Islamic A zad Un iversity , Semn an Branch,

Semnan, Iran. Shamsul Sahibuddin is wi th t he A dvanced In formati cs School, U ni versiti

Teknologi M alaysia, K uala Lumpur , M alaysia. N eda Jalaliyoon is wi th t he Islamic A zad Uni versity, Semn an Branch,

Semnan, Iran.

.

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2012, ISSN (Online) 2151-9617

https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing

WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 128



to look forward to try smart card technology, and at thesame time enjoy the variety of benefits that the systemprovides [2]. One of the important things to be consideredis to increase users’ awareness of the smart card and itsadvantages [2]. Having a general knowledge and know-ing what features and benefits the smart card technologyhas is a considerable issue and it can influence on inten-

tion to adopt the technology [14][13]. Awareness refers tothe effort in providing knowledge and improving under-standing of the smart card. Being aware of the technologywill improve users’ judgment and their ability in usingthe system in a secured manner [4].Know ledge status refers to how well one is aware of whatis available, and is linked to the introduced concept ofawareness [13]. Providing security training and aware-ness programs could help users of the system better un-derstand the purpose for security and recognize their re-spective responsibilities in safeguarding the security ofthe system [1]. Furthermore being aware about the securi-

ty vulnerabilities and security risks can assist users toavoid these kinds of actions [14].Widespread the smart card awareness, education andtraining are the critical success factors to enforce theadoption of the smart card technology [10]. [2] recocom-mend some efforts to be included in increasing theawareness such as develop a nationwide campaign topromote the new smart card for different communitysegments; using newspapers, road banners, television,Internet and other medias to convey information aboutthe smart card; more press conferences and visit toschools and universities to enlighten the young genera-

tion to use the smart card; provide guidelines for theusage and advantages and provide the services of issuingthe cards in place of work in significant corporations, go-vernmental organizations, private and publ ic schools; anduniversities [10].

3 METHODOLOGY

In order to do the evaluation a questionnaire was devel-oped and distributed among the 720 university studentsand 688 were returned. Students were chosen becausethey are among the most informed group of people in thesociety about the smart card or similar technologies. Sur-

vey included two parts.The first part contained questions about respondents’demographic and the second section was about theirawareness and satisfaction. Liker scale has been chosenfor this questionnaire. Regarding the reliability of thesurvey, a value of 0.7 was chosen as an acceptable valuefor Cronbach’s alpha [6] and the Cronbach’s alpha forsatisfaction, adoption and awareness are 0.73, 0.81 and0.79 which are reliable.

4 RESULTS

Before starting the analysis of the responses, to give read-ers a better vision about respondents some descriptivestatistics about the personal information of the respon-dents were prepared. As mentioned earlier, 688 students

participated in this study. As it is shown in Table 1, thenumber of male and female participating in the survey isalmost equal.

Table 1: Gender

Table 2 shows the participants per age distribution. Ac-cording to this Table only 1.5% are above 35 and the mostof respondents are between 21-25 years old.

Table 2:Age distribution

Considering the level of education, 13.7% chose diplomadegree, 78.6% stated that they are doing their bachelorand less than 8% of them doing either M aster or PhD de-gree (Table 3).

Table 3: respondents’ education

Moreover, among the respondent, more than nine out often use smart card technology either on the regular basisor sometimes although near 4% never use it (Table 4).






Table 4:Students famili arity w ith smart card technology

Table 5 shows the students field of study. As it is clear,most of the respondents are from computer and electri citycourses with 23.3% and 16.7%. Subsequent the affect offield of study on awareness and satisfaction is discussed.

Table 5: Student field of study

The second part of the survey includes items regarding

the smart card awareness, satisfaction and acceptance

factors. Table 6 shows the fr equency and percentage of

respondents’ response on awareness items. As it is

shown, almost three quarter of participants stated their

agreement that they are strange with how the smart

card technology works. On the other hand, almost 66%

of respondents agree or powerfully agree that they

have sufficient information to operate smart card sys-

tems. The startling result is that near 20% of respon-dents even do not have enough knowledge to operate

smart card. Additionally, near nine out of ten partici-

pants registered that being aware about the smart card

system and services significantly affect on being satis-

fied to use them. Moreover, Table 6 reveals that more

than 60% of respondents either agree or strongly agree

that they would use smart card technologies if they

were aware more about i t.Then again, the user satisfaction of smart card technol-

ogy w as measured. A s it is shown in Table 7, near all

(95.8%) of respondent either agree or strongly agree

that they are satisfied with smart card technology ver-

sus only 0.7% disagree or strongly disagree. Further-

more, almost nine out of ten of the part icipants (85.5%)

strongly agree and agree that they are using or they

will use smart card technologies in early future against

only 2% of them either disagree or strongly disagree.

Table 7:Frequency statistics of sati sfaction and acceptance items

Table 8 il lustrates that respondents who are study-

ing computer or information systems are more familiar

with the smart card technology versus medicine and

management students have the lowest rank due to the

smart card awareness. It can be understood that as

there are related to new technologies and electronics so

they are more aware of i t, so it is suggested that some

other modules could be offered by facult ies to increase

their students information and knowledge regarding

Table 6: Frequency and percentage of respondents’ response on awareness items






fresh technologies and smart card technology as well .

Table 8:Crosstab of students’ fi eld of study and smart card aware-

ness

The correlation is one of the most common and mostusefu l statistics which is a single number that describes

the degree of relationship between two variables.

Therefore, in order to discover the relation between

awareness aspects, adoption and satisfaction, the

Spearman’s correlation was calculated using SPSS

software. As it is revealed in Table 9, satisfaction and

awareness items have the positive and significant cor-

relation at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Furthermore,

awareness items have influence adoption positively

and signifi cantly .

4 CONCLUSION

In order to use any new technology, first, it is needed

to have knowledge and information about the advan-

tages, features, characteristics and applications of it.

Therefore, being aware about the technology can moti-

vate consumers to accept any fresh technologies [13].

Awareness about technology cause users to look for-

ward to try technology and at the same time enjoys the

various benefi ts that the system provides [2][14].

Being aware about smart card can help users to under-

stand the technology and it can influence on successful

applying smart card technology in society. Findings of

this research show that users are not w ell aware about

the smart card technology. On the other hand, in all

applications, the training of the user is a key element

that needs to be integrated in any kind of smart card

deployment. The user needs to understand the func-

tion of smart card, ways and reasons to protect the

card [14]. In addition, it was illustrated that awareness

has a signi fi cant and posit ive effect on user satisfaction

and consequently on adoption. It means that with in-

creasing the level of awareness, the level of user sati s-

faction will be increased [13] and since, satisfaction of

the computer system will have a direct effect on usage

[12] therefore the acceptance rate wil l be rised. A ware-

ness about technology cause users to look forward to

tr y technology and at the same time enjoys the various

benefits that the system provides [12]. Finally, being

Table 9: Correlation between satisfaction, adoption and awareness






aware of the technology w il l improve users’ judgment

and their ability in using the system in a secured man-

ner [3][13].

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