Abstract
Sketches the key characteristics of the newly information enfranchised general public (the digital information consumers). Portrays the digital consumer as all‐conquering/powerful, short on attention, promiscuous, untrusting and – above all – interested in speed of delivery. Argues for a fundamental re‐think of the concept of the information “user”. The Web, search engines etc. are creating a level‐playing field and a homogeneity which results in academics behaving more like the general consumer and the general consumer behaving more like an academic. Considers the overall outcomes and benefits of information acquisition.
Keywords
Citation
Nicholas, D., Dobrowolski, T., Withey, R., Russell, C., Huntington, P. and Williams, P. (2003), "Digital information consumers, players and purchasers: information seeking behaviour in the new digital interactive environment", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 55 No. 1/2, pp. 23-31. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012530310462689
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited
Introduction
We were surprised at the initial hostility shown towards the first “end‐user” recruits in the late 1970s/early 1980s and were always convinced that the disparaging of their search styles and information seeking behaviour was much to do with professional insecurity. However, all of this concerned bibliographic systems, largely devised for information professionals, academics and scientists. These were niche players, using niche and targeted systems. All that has now changed. Towards the end of the 1980s the number of end‐users went through the roof, from hundreds to thousands and then on to millions in the 1990s and tens of millions in the new millennium. No one disparages them anymore – there are too many of them for that; they have considerable clout and we now call them consumers, as recognition of their new found (economic) powers.
It was not just the numbers of people using the systems that changed so dramatically, the types of people using the systems changed dramatically too: people without any previous experience of information systems – children, the elderly, those who had never been to university, and the unemployed. Of course, the systems themselves were changing fast. No longer OPACS to find references, but now the Web to download music or shop, or digital interactive television (DiTV) to check out on an ailment with a broadband nurse. No longer static, archival systems in public or work places, but mobile systems, real‐time systems, interactive systems in the home; systems that owed more to the media world than they did to the world of information retrieval and references. Moreover, systems that were very cheap to use compared to their predecessors.
The end‐user has become the information consumer, indeed, the information player. Player is a good term that recognises that today’s information seeking can be interactive, recreational, social and competitive and acknowledges the characteristics of individuality and activity that define today’s online engagements (Nicholas and Dobrowolski, 2000).
Given the seismic shifts chronicled above one would logically expect the new digital information consumers to act and react very differently from those landmark Dialog, Nexis and Reuters end‐users. But there are not the data to tell us how differently. Information researchers still seem obsessed with students and academics – easy to research groups, but hardly unknown, representative or even strategic. Most worryingly perhaps, unrepresentative, old and dangerously obsolescent models of information consumer behaviour are being peddled around.
Aims and objectives
The aims of this paper are to provide early intelligence as to how the new digital information consumer behaves when seeking information, advice and services online, whether this is via the Web, digital interactive television or touch‐screen kiosk. It also aims to show how the information fingerprints, the first footfalls of millions, of people can be charted and evaluated. We now have more accurate ways of mapping the new information landscape, which possibly brings into question the small and sketchy pictures we drew of the “old” landscape.
And it is precisely what these new information consumers are getting up to and what they may do next which concerns us most here. We have been amongst the first people to study one of the first – and much hyped – “flights” of consumers to the Web: that of newspaper readers (Nicholas et al., 2000). Millions of people flocked to the newspapers we studied – The Times, Sunday Times, The Independent and The Guardian. Here we obtained our first glimpses of the “upside down” new world order of the digital consumer – all these sites were haemorrhaging money – as they are still. The digital consumer does not like paying directly for information and the advertisers that prop‐up these sites are not at all convinced that consumers read the advertising on these sites because they do not stay around long enough. Despite the digital largesse of the media magnates, people still seem happy to buy hard‐copy newspapers. In consequence, their hard‐copy cousins have to bail them out, something that is now impossible to do given the shortfalls in advertising income resulting from the events of 11 September.
More recently (2000‐2003) we have been charged by the Department of Health to evaluate the similarly much‐hyped roll‐out of digital health services to the nation (Nicholas et al., 2002a). Health, forgive the pun, is allegedly the killer digital application and large sums of Government money are being spent to ensure that is the case – the same, of course, was said about news (Nicholas and Frossling, 1996). The lesson that the digital consumer does not like paying for their information has been learnt (but not by everybody of course – see FT.com’s latest effort to get people to pay), but the question now is whether the Government has deep enough pockets to bankroll them? This time the roll‐out is on a different and much more ambitious scale, the consumer is being offered three digital platforms from which to make their choice – touch‐screen kiosk, Web and digital interactive television. Part of our work is to determine whether, for the consumer, this really represents choice or the digital fog descending.
And most recently (2002‐2003) we have been studying the use of mobile phones by teenagers – surely the most passionate communications love affair of all (Nicholas and Chivhanga, 2002).
The digital consumer is rapidly metamorphosing into the digital purchaser. They now add a growing commercial consideration to the decision mix. Following Christmas 2001, 78 per cent of consumers stated that they would probably look to purchase “more” or “significantly more” online in Christmas 2002 (eDigitalResearch. com, 2001). In addition users’ expectations for Internet purchases are rapidly changing. They expect better pricing, ease of use, secure payments as well as the complete customer service back up they would get from traditional channels. Interestingly, and perhaps more worryingly for manufacturers and High Street retailers with large marketing budgets, “brand” and “high street” presence seemed to have little relevance to the digital consumer (eDigitalResearch.com, 2002) – an important characteristic of the digital consumer we shall return to.
Methods
Plainly a few people in Clerkenwell (City University) evaluating the information seeking behaviour of millions of people on digital information platforms as diverse as DiTV, the Web, touch‐screen and mobile phone require a special type of methodology, and we believe we have that. All these systems record the information activities of their users (transactions) as a kind of digital fingerprint. They do this on a real‐time and continuous basis. We call them logs – they constitute the CCTV of cyberspace. Logs provide a methodological level playing field, which enables comparisons to be made between sites, services and digital platforms. They also enable us to pen information portraits of whole populations of people rather than small communities – although, of course, we can do this as well. We have logs for millions of health information consumers, in some cases for a period of as much as five years. As we write, thousands and thousands more digital fingerprints enter the database and will continue to do so for a number of years to come, so we can monitor change and obtain a video, rather than snapshot, of the rapidly unfolding digital revolution. The sheer numbers of consumers allow an accuracy of opinion and evaluation not dreamt of, utilising traditional research techniques where costs of collection are a direct (increasing) proportion to the number of users interviewed. New digital techniques of collection and analysis allow for a previously unheard of theoretical 100 per cent collection rate amongst the total user population of any particular digital service. This digital information tide places big question marks against portraits drawn on the basis of small and unrepresentative samples. In other words we might not only have been working on the wrong models, but on small and unrepresentative data sets.
The logs we work with are anonymised and generalised but nevertheless tell us much about patterns of information seeking behaviour and a certain amount about the personal characteristics of the people searching the systems – age, gender, and postcode obtained through people willingly entering this data at the touch‐screen kiosk or via a questionnaire. But not so revealing as to break privacy laws. For fuller details on the process of log analysis see Nicholas et al. (1999).
Used together with online pop‐up and traditional questionnaires and interviews the data is particularly rich and revealing. It can be triangulated to give us a real “grip” of what is going on. Indeed, the data collection rates, as well as the quality obtained from unsolicited Web based research, seems to indicate that users have a propensity to provide useful feedback of their experiences. Digital research methods allow instant and real‐time feedback of opinion and habits from the digital consumer.
Digital consumer characteristics
Enormous and unprecedented numbers
If we can believe every Web site “hits” release, digital consumer traffic is only ever measured in millions. Indeed, even if these counts are inflated and misleading, their sheer numbers are probably the digital consumers’ key identifying characteristic. The numbers are now so large that they have become meaningless – we expect them to be large, we get blasé. But there is a negative aspect to the impressive audience figures and their relentless growth – it puts people off analysing these large sets of data and thus they fail to obtain an understanding of the new digital information consumer. Even in the newly emerging digital health field that we have recently entered the numbers are beginning to rattle‐up (Nicholas et al., 2002a). The NHS Direct Online Web site attracts around 1,500 visitors a day. The 80 or so touch‐screen kiosks of InTouch With Health attract going on to a 1,000 people a day; 400 people a day accessed the pioneering Living Health digital interactive television channel in the Birmingham area and 50 people send e‐mail enquiries to NHS Direct Online everyday. And this is from a standing start. It is very early days indeed for digital health services. It is the reach figures that are really impressive though, especially in the health field. In the Birmingham area where a DiTV health service was rolled out recently, after six months just under 40 per cent of Telewest subscribers had availed themselves of the service. Of course, big numbers make big waves.
All‐powerful
There has been a massive shift in power from information provider to information consumer. Information players have enormous power. And this is not just because of their numbers. It is also to do with the fact that they have huge choice (something we will pick‐up later on) and the backing of governments everywhere. Providing power and choice to the consumer has become a political mantra.
Personal characteristics
Digital information users are no longer just academics or professionals. Nor are they just adults or young IT obsessed men. In fact our health research shows that there are quite different audiences for the various digital platforms and services (Nicholas et al., 2002a). Thus DiTV users tend to be older (well over a third were aged over 55); health Web site users were typically 35‐54, and kiosk users were largely young (under 35 year olds). Women were slightly more likely to use digital health services than men, except in the case of DiTV and, interestingly, a kiosk located near the pharmacy in Safeway! DiTV users were also more likely to be unemployed, a housewife/mother, or retired. To the DoH this was encouraging in that it supported the argument that DiTV throws an ICT lifeline to those who have traditionally been excluded from the digital revolution – the poor and socially excluded. And we all know about how teenagers are attracted to mobile phones.
The Internet, initially a male dominated domain, now reflects the gender balance of the general population. In addition we perhaps cannot rely on the traditional demographic profiling used to neatly predict consumer behaviour. There is a need to revisit how users view digital media and how these new user profiles react to the fast moving delivery methods activated by this media.
OPAC and commercial online researchers never had to contend with one kind of “user” found in large numbers in cyberspace – the robot or the spider, sent out, for instance, by search engines for indexing purposes. Robots were found to account for 30 per cent of users in our newspaper studies (Nicholas et al., 2000). The question is do they constitute users and should they be counted with human users? Most software programs tend to exclude them, but that is too easy.
Promiscuous users – short attention spans and short visits
Today’s information consumer is a “flicker” or a “bouncer”. As children use the remote to channel hop, so their parents information hop or bounce their way across the digital information terrain, and especially the Web. Our studies show that one third of kiosk users never really get beyond the initial menu pages, the figure for DiTV is a quarter and for the Web, where it is much easier to bounce around because of the greater choices on offer, around 40 per cent. We call these people “bouncers”. We are all bouncers. This results from a number of factors:
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having very short attention spans;
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running up continuously against home pages we do not like the look of;
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being hostage to a retrieval system (the search engine) that is constantly coming up with empty, irrelevant or uninteresting postings;
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downloading and printing of data for “use” later;
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people find surfing a stimulating leisure activity, like window‐shopping (it is connectivity rather than interactivity that is sought); and
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huge choice.
Even those who penetrate the sites – rarely go beyond the home page or wander very far. They nibble rather than bite. This kind of behaviour costs the information providers and sponsors a lot of money. They would much prefer we hang around, that the sites be “sticky” and more importantly come back for more.
Promiscuous
The most important reason why people flick or bounce is because they have choice – the wealth of alternative digital sources enables them to do so. Data suggest that we visit many sites but “use” few (eDigitalResearch. com, 2002). We are “promiscuous” consumers. In addition users are more aware of their ability and come to realise that they are empowered to cross traditional boundaries, whether these be geographic (e.g. wow.com shipping CDs to UK from Hong Kong, offshore gambling) or knowledge based (health issues). In research into Web site use we have found that users visit many sites but currently purchase from few sites.
What we do not know is what arises when previously niche and specialist services, like health services, are now juxtaposed with holiday, football and retail sites/services in the digital information window that is DiTV or the Internet. Plainly there must be some kind of a knock‐on or interaction, but as yet we can only guess as to what it might be.
Untrusting
The multiplicity of access points to information – TV, newspapers, consumer magazines, learned journals, radio, Internet, PDA, Online services – confuses the consumer and leads to a breakdown in trust and information dissonance (Bayler and Stoughton, 2002). In comparison with print media, all electronic media (including analogue broadcast) are difficult to navigate and reference. In essence they are two‐dimensional, whereas print is three‐dimensional because the shape of the whole experience can be successfully deduced from the physical form. For example, even the briefest knowledge of a print newspaper (which is not usually indexed at primary use level) leads the consumer to an understanding of what they will find and where in a relatively standard formula. Digital formats, and the Web in particular, have a tendency to break down this easy familiarity and leave the consumer floating in a sea of uncertainty. The consumer responds by demoting considerations of trust and loyalty.
Of course, there are also the “authority” problems that arise from a relatively new and fast changing environment with new players coming in all the time. Authority is plainly “up for grabs”. It is difficult to determine ownership because there are so many parties associated with the production of a digital information service. Take a touch‐screen health information kiosk, produced by Surgerydoor, containing some information from NHS Direct Online and located in a Safeway store. To the person shopping in the supermarket who sees the kiosk and decides to use it, whom do they attribute its qualities to: Safeway, Surgerydoor – a company of which they have probably never heard, or to the NHS, should they be alert enough to spot its logo. There is no easy answer of course, but one suspects they might say Safeway.
At one time consumers trusted in the experience of the information provider. In the flattened world of the Internet, where all things are seemingly equal, experience appears less important than ever – hence the diminishing role of information professionals in the search process.
Our research shows that where advertising is obtrusive there was a reduction in trustworthiness and that traditional quality marks – like that of the NHS – are of limited worth (Nicholas et al., 2003). Half of the respondents in one study we conducted did not even notice that the material was produced by the NHS (despite the strategically placed logo) and in another study younger cable respondents were less likely to recognise the NHS as a symbol of trust than their elders.
There is a sense that consumers are more brand conscious, but less brand loyal. This applies to information just as much as whiskies. Information specialists have largely accepted that information has become a commodity (sometimes, but sometimes not, with an expressed value attached to it) but do not often accept the consequences of this.
Given all this, how will the digital consumer make “purchase” decisions in the future? This is a question that will continue to exercise the commercial mind over the coming years. We have already seen fundamental changes to purchase patterns in some market places, causing dramatic shifts in corporate thinking, e.g. books, music, low cost air travel. As the search and purchase habits of the digital consumer continue to change and evolve – questions such as brand loyalty and brand and product identification become increasingly important. For example, traditionally a consumer shopping for groceries uses a variety of complex processes in making purchase decisions. How will they make those same decisions when faced with possibly more information, more choice and a different set of purchase influences? How does a brand aware consumer find and then successfully purchase the product he or she wants to buy without being seduced by a lower cost digitally available alternative? We have already seen some traditional distribution channels forced to mount successful defences of their income streams. Free music downloads through Napster.com vs traditional music publishers being one example. How many more will follow?
Novice retrievers
The digital consumer is faced frontally with the problem of retrieval. It is an inescapable process of digital information consumption. For all but experienced researchers (a minority of users), this is the first time they have faced the dilemmas of precision versus recall, of noise, and of deciding on the validity of sources. Information providers have to be aware of this and solve these problems in the same way as, in the past, they have provided contents pages, indexes and TV guides. The role of content is becoming inescapably linked, in the user’s mind, with its ease or difficulty of retrieval, and this is often something quite outside the control of the original publisher. Publishers therefore are moving beyond questions of “how accurate is this?” or “how readable?” to “how visible is it?”
The concept of an information player is a very helpful one in understanding how the general public interact with digital systems – and, also, re‐visiting what we have said and learnt about them in the past. Using a sports analogy, few goals are probably scored in a textbook manner. Thus the stars of the football world, like Paulo Di Canio, are famous for their ability to do the unconventional, the unusual, the creative. In any game of football players do a lot of things that are not in the training/coaching manuals, but plainly they have received training. Similarly, a lot of information is collected by unconventional, unusual or serendipitous means. Thus, maybe, what is seen as minimalist and idiosyncratic information behaviour is not so odd, strange etc. after all – maybe it was just creative. Certainly this kind of behaviour is more in tune with the thinking of Google than Dialog.
Amongst the consumer there is almost a total delegation of trust to the search engine, which is invested in almost magical powers of retrieval. So powerful is the magic that few people even ask how the search is conducted, what is being searched (and, more importantly, what is not). Now, arguably, this would not be too serious if all people were doing was searching for references or e‐shopping, but when it is your health or welfare that is a different story (and this is not fully realised).
Want it now
Total access and speed of delivery appear to be the consumers’ key information needs requirements. They have certainly surpassed traditional quality concerns, which is disturbing for information professionals, who have traditionally played the role of quality guardians – and still cling on to the role with suggestions of portals and the like. Total access and speed of delivery are the perceived characteristics of Amazon.com, but not of the academic or public library. And, of course, this is why the mobile phone has proved such a spectacular success – it is an always on, real‐time system. Nobody today wants to wait; nobody wants to queue – even if they could. Time plainly is a rare commodity. Connectivity is what our teenage mobile phone users tell us they yearn for. And what will surely drive the use of the mobile phone as an information retrieval medium will be the vast and ever‐increasing amounts of real‐time information becoming available.
Real‐time information, once the exclusive and treasured domain of journalist/stockbroker, is open to all and is now what everyone wants, it is the benchmark.
Consumers converging?
Convergence is the buzz phrase, however, everything that has happened in recent years seems to suggest the very opposite is happening. DiTV is the new convergent kid on the block. DiTV, the vehicle for WebTV, is not only a brand new platform, about which very little is known, it is also a platform on which much hope is invested. There is a sense, amongst politicians certainly, that this is the platform. It has real consumer reach, genuine general public credentials and will thus be the main conduit for a whole range of e‐government and e‐local government services for the public. Essentially, the argument goes, everybody has a television (and soon a digital television), more than one in many cases, everybody is familiar with them, and maybe most importantly it throws an ICT lifeline to all those who have been excluded from the digital revolution to date – the poor, socially excluded, elderly etc.
However, our data tells us that it is very much digital horses for courses. Web users certainly are not convinced at all about the benefits of DiTV. Platforms are one further manifestation of choice.
Interactive consumers?
Interactivity – surely the great sell and the big disappointment? Interactivity must be the most abused, misused word in the digital world. So much so we have introduced another word, transaction, to differentiate services that offer more than the ability to interrogate a database and download a few pages of information. Transactional services are those services that involve a much closer engagement, a much greater degree of two‐way interactivity. Many e‐services involve nothing more than digital leaflet distribution or a mail‐order facility. However, in the case of one of the digital introductions we have evaluated – the In‐Vision service, a broadband on your television, in your home, nursing service – you have something that begins to meet the consumers’ expectations of what interactive services are all about (Nicholas et al., 2002b). Interestingly, whether it was too intrusive or just too novel, the take‐up was disappointingly low (130 people used the service in six months).
In addition there are equally strong signs that the digital consumer will research and take commercial decisions online when presented with a viable alternative and less expensive method of decision making and subsequent acquisition.
Unpredictability
If nothing else, the digital consumer is unpredictable. Of course this unpredictability partially stems from the fact that the digital information consumer is such a recent and fast emerging phenomenon.
When a digital service is rolled out the unexpected inevitably happens, take:
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Touch‐screen information kiosks. Health touch‐screen information kiosks, designed with the elderly in mind, turned out to be most popular with the under 15s.
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Mobile phones. Few people anticipated the phenomenal rise of the mobile phone. And no one at all surely anticipated that it would be children who would fuel much of this growth. After all, the cellular phone was originally conceived as a communications technology for people away from the office – farmers and sales executives. Then there is the enormous popularity of text messaging amongst children, on a medium that was designed to trumpet the well‐known attractions of oral communication.
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Digital libraries. The Big Deal was a solution to the “serials crisis” which was developed during 1997. The basic deal is that the publisher continues to receive the same amount of money as they received from print subscriptions from all the libraries in a consortium. For a small surcharge, all the libraries in the consortium receive electronic access to all the journals published by a particular company. The advantages of the deal were seen as: increasing content delivered per dollar spent; stabilising economic relationships; maximising content delivery per publisher; maximising use via electronic access. All these things were achieved but what was not anticipated was that journals previously not subscribed to in print were used more than those previously subscribed to – questioning as a result intermediary involvement in the selection process. Of course, the unbundling of articles from their journals that occurs in the digital environment could well provide the explanation (Nicholas et al., 2003).
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E‐commerce. New brands and distribution methods can earn the trust of consumers and become leaders in their field in a very short time span, challenging traditional methods of distribution (e.g. amazon. com, easyJet.com).
Outcomes and benefits
What happens when the controls are taken off and people who have been starved of information, or told only what information is considered good for them, wake up to the fact that there has been a revolution and now information is everywhere and easily accessed? Flood the area with information – pipe it into people’s homes, surgeries, railway stations and libraries and something really big is likely to happen. We have the makings of the biggest information bang ever heard. The first rumblings can already be heard – after all there are millions of consumers on the information road now.
Performance measurements have been important to information and computer professionals, but usually only in terms of search engine efficiency and the relevance judgements of the users – before they actually go away and digest and make something of the information. But of course the real concern now is that, when life‐critical services, like health, are moving over to the digital environment what do consumers do with the information and how does it impact on other services and aspects of their lives. The fact that someone used a Web site and maybe consumed the information or bought the product is interesting, but not half as interesting as what it did for them and how it affected the other things they do.
There is more than a little suspicion that the Government believes that the provision of digital information direct to the consumer will go some way to reducing the pressures on the health service – a case, maybe, of patient heal yourself. There is indeed some evidence to suggest this is happening. One third of Living Health television channel viewers said that the information found either helped or helped a lot in improving their condition. This constitutes an important use of a health information service. The younger the respondent the more likely they were to report substituting information they had found for a visit to the doctor. There were signs too of joined‐up health information acquisition. Well over half DiTV users queried the service for information about their consultation with the doctor either before, after or before and after their consultation.
In commercial markets we also see changing purchase patterns as information becomes more readily available and consumers understand how to find it. Consumers have steadily increasing access to more information to pricing, availability and details of products and services. Despite the effect of 11 September the low cost airlines report increasing volumes of travellers (easyJet up 36 per cent half year on corresponding half year) with bookings over the Internet taking an increasing proportion of bookings (easyJet, 2002).
Reflections and conclusions
It is a story of big change, all change and rapid change. There are lessons for us all:
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Most of all that the behaviour of the digital consumer needs to be tracked and evaluated as a matter of course. We have shown how spectacular and unexpected it can be. As more services go digital we need to fill the intelligence vacuum quickly.
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Information vendors and providers (libraries included) will have to engage in the same processes as all other providers of goods and services, and put customer relationship management (CRM) at the centre of the information experience rather than at its periphery (or commonly, nowhere at all). As Rakesh Sood (2002) pointed out in an article published in TheStreet.com:
What does the emerging promiscuous era hold for vendors? Locking in customers becomes more difficult. Vendors will need to further differentiate their offerings, re‐examine their value proposition and stay on their toes while executing at a higher level on a continuous basis. While periods of temporary dislocation are inevitable, the customer is the ultimate beneficiary. Is it likely that, before too long, the adage “the customer is king” becomes transformed into “the promiscuous customer is king”?
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Not only do we need to challenge our assumptions about the information consumer, but we also need to ask where digital information provision, and especially the Web, is taking the consumer. Consumers are being fast‐forwarded to a data‐driven world, in which the only thing that changes is the amount of information made available to them and the platforms on which this information is disseminated. Loads of links, endless links, thousands of postings characterise the journey – an endless information journey with seemingly no destination. Consumers are unlikely to even remember where they went on their journey; they will retain little of the information, or how they can return to it. There is no sense of knowledge building. People are gradually being divorced from the roots of communication/knowledge. The problem is that the (false) sense of engagement and action associated with online searching/surfing makes the consumer feel that something is being achieved, but this is not always the case.
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The other worrying phenomenon, and it is linked to the above bullet, is that it is not the information or content providers that are making anything out of digital information provision but the telecoms companies. Telecoms companies are technologically driven and think about nothing more than backbones (and profits). If things continue like this for long there could soon be no content providers worth the name. Could you imagine a world in which supermarkets gave their produce away for free and the councils charged you for access to the roads that led to the supermarkets? No, well that is the situation we have in cyberspace.
References
Bayler, M. and Stoughton, D. (2002), Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands, Capstone, Oxford.
easyJet (2002), “easyJet reports 91 per cent of bookings taken online”, easyJet Interim Report, 31 March.
eDigitalResearch.com (2001), Has Commerce Come of Age?, January, available at: www.emysteryshopper.com (accessed 8 January).
eDigitalResearch.com (2002), Vital Statistics, April, available at: www/mysteryshopper.com (accessed April).
Nicholas, D. and Chivhanga, M. (2002), “The communications love‐affair: children and the mobile phone”, Library Association Record, Vol. 104 No. 2, February, pp. 90‐5.
Nicholas, D. and Dobrowolski, T. (2000), “Re‐branding and re‐discovering the digital information user”, Libri, Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 157‐62.
Nicholas, D. and Frossling, I. (1996), “The information handler in the digital age”, Managing Information, Vol. 3 No. 7/8, pp. 31‐4.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P. and Watkinson, A. (2003), “Digital journals, Big Deals and online searching behaviour: a pilot study”, Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 55 No. 1/2, pp. 84‐109.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Lievesley, N. and Wasti, A. (2000), “Evaluating consumer Web site logs: case study – The Times/Sunday Times Web site”, Journal of Information Science, Vol. 26 No. 6, pp. 399‐411.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Williams, P. and Gunter, B. (2002a), First Steps Towards Providing the Nation with Health care Advice and Information via Their Television Sets: An Evaluation of Pilot Projects Exploring the Health Applications of Digital Interactive Television. Report to the Department of Health, City University, London.
Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Huntington, P. and Gunter, B. (2002b), “Broadband nursing: how have the public reacted to being able to talk to an on‐screen nurse for advice?”, Library and Information Update the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 50‐1.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Williams, P., Lievesley, N. and Withey, R. (1999), “Developing and testing methods to determine the use of Web sites: case study newspapers”, Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 51 No. 5, pp. 144‐54.
Sood, R. (2002), “Making promiscuity pay”, available at: www.thestreet.com/pf/comment/connectingdots/1014698.html (accessed 11 February 2002).
Further reading
Nicholas, D., Gunter, B., Williams, P. and Huntington, P. (2002), “DiTV – a healthy future”, usableiTV, Vol. 2, pp. 13‐17.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Williams, P. and Gunter, B. (2003), “Digital consumer perceptions of the authority of health information: case study digital interactive television and the Internet”, Health Information and Libraries Journal, Spring (in press).