DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

The WeChat Mini Program for Smart Tourism

  • Ao Cheng (College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Gang Ren (School of Business Administration, Kookmin University) ;
  • Taeho Hong (College of Business Administration, Pusan National University) ;
  • Chulmo Koo (College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University)
  • Received : 2019.03.14
  • Accepted : 2019.08.29
  • Published : 2019.09.30

Abstract

The WeChat mini program is an application embedded in WeChat that users can use without downloading and installing. After it was officially released in 2017, many travel enterprises have launched their own mini programs on the WeChat platform. This study applies affordance theory to investigate the WeChat mini program's role in tourism activities through social network analysis using the R programming language. The authors searched the topic of "how do you perceive the travel-related WeChat mini program" and then crawled the 200 comments found; 180 comments were analyzed after data cleansing. The results show that travel-related WeChat mini programs play a very important role in Chinese social network tourism activities. This paper found that WeChat played a more active role in various tourism-related interactions with Chinese social networks. Moreover, the results show how affordance theory is applied to the use of WeChat mini programs.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

1. This work was supported by LG Yonam Foundation (of Korea). 2. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A2A2028351).

References

  1. Baerentsen, K. B., and Trettvik, J. (2002, October). An activity theory approach to affordance. In Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction (pp. 51-60). ACM.
  2. Baltrunas, L., Church, K., Karatzoglou, A., and Oliver, N. (2015). Frappe: Understanding the usage and perception of mobile app recommendations in-the-wild. arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.03014.
  3. Beynon-Davies, P., and Lederman, R. (2017). Making sense of visual management through affordance theory. Production Planning & Control, 28(2), 142-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537287.2016.1243267
  4. Cabiddu, F., De Carlo, M., and Piccoli, G. (2014). Social media affordances: Enabling customer engagement. Annals of Tourism Research, 48, 175-192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.06.003
  5. Carlsson, C., Carlsson, J., Hyvonen, K., Puhakainen, J., and Walden, P. (2006). Adoption of mobile devices/services-searching for answers with the UTAUT. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06).
  6. Charles Newark-French (2011). Retrieved 12 March 2019, from https://flurrymobile.tumblr.com/post/113370456225/mobile-app-inventory-hungry-enough-to-eat-internet
  7. Conole, G., and Dyke, M. (2004). What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?.
  8. Csardi, G., and Nepusz, T. (2006). The igraph software package for complex network research. InterJournal, Complex Systems, 1695(5), 1-9.
  9. Eddington, S. M. (2018). The Communicative Constitution of Hate Organizations Online: A Semantic Network Analysis of "Make America Great Again." Social Media+ Society, 4(3), 2056305118790763.
  10. Faraj, S., and Azad, B. (2012). The materiality of technology: An affordance perspective. Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world, 237, 258.
  11. Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems.
  12. Gibson James, J. (1977). The Theory of Affordances. W Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Towards an Ecological Psychology, Robert Shaw, and John Bransford (eds.), 67-82. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  13. Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA, US: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
  14. Guo Quanzhong (2017). Mini program and its future. News and Writing, 3, 28-30.
  15. Hartson, R. (2003). Cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional affordances in interaction design. Behaviour & Information Technology, 22(5), 315-338. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290310001592587
  16. Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology, 35(2), 441-456. https://doi.org/10.1177/S0038038501000219
  17. Hwang, K.-H., Chan-Olmsted, S. M., Nam, S.-H., and Chang, B.-H. (2016). Factors affecting mobile application usage: exploring the roles of gender, age, and application types from behavior log data. International Journal of Mobile Communications, 14(3), 256-272. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMC.2016.076285
  18. Im, I., Hong, S., and Kang, M. S. (2011). An international comparison of technology adoption: Testing the UTAUT model. Information & Management, 48(1), 1-8.
  19. Kennedy-Eden, H., and Gretzel, U. (2012). A taxonomy of mobile applications in tourism.
  20. Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies.
  21. Li, H., and Lu, X. (2017). Mining device-specific apps usage patterns from large-scale android users. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.09252.
  22. Liang, Q., and Chang, C. (2019). Construction of Teaching Model Based on Wechat Mini program. International Journal of Science, 16(1), 54-59.
  23. Lintern, G. (2000). An affordance-based perspective on human-machine interface design. Ecological Psychology, 12(1), 65-69. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326969ECO1201_7
  24. Ma, L., Wang, L., and Jiang, E. (2018, July). Empirical Study on the Wechat Mini Program Acceptance Based on UTA UT Model Take the Pearl River Delta as an Example. In 2018 15th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management (ICSSSM) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
  25. Maier, J. R., and Fadel, G. M. (2009). Affordance based design: a relational theory for design. Research in Engineering Design, 20(1), 13-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-008-0060-3
  26. Majchrzak, A., and Markus, M. L. (2012). Technology affordances and constraints in management information systems (MIS). Encyclopedia of Management Theory, (Ed: E. Kessler), Sage Publications, Forthcoming.
  27. Majchrzak, A., Faraj, S., Kane, G. C., and Azad, B. (2013). The contradictory influence of social media affordances on online communal knowledge sharing. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 38-55. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12030
  28. McGrenere, J., and Ho, W. (2000). Affordances: Clarifying and evolving a concept. Paper presented at the Graphics interface.
  29. Michelle Saettler (2018). TripAdvisor boosts non-transactional mobile travel with offline app features. Retrieved 12 March 2019, from https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/strategy/18161.html
  30. Mickaiel, I (2011). Mobile the new black for travel. Retrieved 12 March 2019, from http://www.zdnet.com.au/mobile-the-new-black-for-travel-339321469.htm
  31. Norman, D. A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York, NY, US: Basic Books.
  32. Pavlou, P. A. (2003). Consumer acceptance of electronic commerce: Integrating trust and risk with the technology acceptance model. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 7(3), 101-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2003.11044275
  33. Pons, P., and Latapy, M. (2006). Computing communities in large networks using random walks. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, 10(2), 191-218. https://doi.org/10.7155/jgaa.00124
  34. Pozzi, G., Pigni, F., and Vitari, C. (2013). Affordance theory in the IS discipline: A review and synthesis of the literature. AMCIS 2014 Proceedings.
  35. Qiao, Y., Zhao, X., Yang, J., and Liu, J. (2016). Mobile big-data-driven rating framework: Measuring the relationship between human mobility and app usage behavior. IEEE Network, 30(3), 14-21. https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.2016.7474339
  36. Qin, W., and Wu, Y. (2019). "jiebaR: Chinese Text Segmentation," R Package (version 0.10.99). available at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=jiebaR.
  37. Quanzhong, G. (2017). Mini program and its future. News Write, 3, 28-30.
  38. Sadler, E., and Given, L. M. (2007). Affordance theory: A framework for graduate students' information behavior. Journal of Documentation, 63(1), 115-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410710723911
  39. Santo, K., Kirkendall, S., Chalmers, J., Chow, C., and Redfern, J. (2017). Mobile phone usage patterns in an acute coronary syndrome cohort. Heart, Lung and Circulation, 26, S87-S88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlc.2017.06.101
  40. Seidel, S., Recker, J., and Vom Brocke, J. (2013). Sensemaking and sustainable practicing: functional affordances of information systems in green transformations. Mis Quarterly, 1275-1299.
  41. Simon-Calder (2017). Why smartphone APPs are changing the future of travel. Retrieved 13 March 2019, from https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/smartphone-apps-tripadvisor-changing-future-travel-digital-holiday-bookings-etickets-social-media-a8043246.html
  42. TechWeb (2018). Retrieved 13 March 2019, from http://www.techweb.com.cn/data/2018-07-11/2684850.shtml
  43. Tencent Big Data (2016). Retrieved 13 March 2019, from http://data.qq.com/reports
  44. Treem, J. W., and Leonardi, P. M. (2013). Social media use in organizations: Exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. Annals of the International Communication Association, 36(1), 143-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2013.11679130
  45. TripBarometer (2016). Retrieved 12 March 2019, from https://www.tripadvisor.com
  46. Vijayasarathy, L. R. (2004). Predicting consumer intentions to use on-line shopping: the case for an augmented technology acceptance model. Information & Management, 41(6), 747-762. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2003.08.011
  47. Wu, J.-H., and Wang, S.-C. (2005). What drives mobile commerce?: An empirical evaluation of the revised technology acceptance model. Information & Management, 42(5), 719-729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2004.07.001
  48. Wu, X., Zhang, Y., Zhang, J., and Cui, R. (2018, October). Design and Implementation of College Online Learning System Based on WeChat Mini Program. In 2018 9th International Conference on Information Technology in Medicine and Education (ITME) (pp. 447-451). IEEE.
  49. Yang, Q., and Zhang, L. (2017). Viewing the Development of WeChat mini program from the Internet Ecology. News Tribune, 2, 22-24.
  50. Zhang, P. (2008). Motivational affordances: Reasons for ICT design and use. Communications of the ACM, 51(11), 145-147. https://doi.org/10.1145/1400214.1400244
  51. Zhao, Y., Liu, J., Tang, J., and Zhu, Q. (2013). Conceptualizing perceived affordances in social media interaction design. Aslib Proceedings.
  52. Zhou, T., Lu, Y., and Wang, B. (2010). Integrating TTF and UTAUT to explain mobile banking user adoption. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 760-767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.01.013
  53. 2016-2017 China Tourism Consumer Market Development Report (2017). Retrieved 13 March 2019, from http://www.ctaweb.org/html/2017-1/2017-1-10-11-15-58731.html