Factors enabling the use of mobile Internet services by information disadvantaged people

Little is known about disadvantaged people's adoption and use of mobile Internet services in such a global mobile technologies age. This paper aims to fill this gap by identifying enablers that affect disadvantaged people's adoption and use of mobile Internet services. We present the preliminary results from a qualitative user study with 21 participants, including twelve urban migrant workers and nine elderly people who are recognized as information disadvantaged people in China. Experience experiment, questionnaires and interviews were employed to capture the participants' perception of a mobile lottery application. The factors that affected their use intention were identified and classified into three categories: system factors, social factors and individual factors. Two forms of instructional strategies that guided users' learning were proposed and their effects were examined. This study could be of significance for the design of services based on mobile Internet for information disadvantaged people and contributes to digital inequality and IT adoption by groups stand on the unfortunate side of the divide.