JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2012, ISSN (Online) 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.

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Smart Card Technology; Awareness and Satisfaction

Hamed Taherdoost, Shamsul Sahibuddin and Neda Jalaliyoon
AbstractSmart 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 TermsSmart card, satisfaction, awareness, technology acceptance, adoption, information technology.

1 INTRODUCTION
mart cards are continuously introduced into different .areas of life around the globe. Smart card is a standard-sized plastic card that contains an integrated circuit or chip which gives the card the ability to store and/or process data [15][10]. A smart card is characterized uniquely by its chip, with its ability to store much more data than is held on a magnetic stripe, all within an extremely secure environment, with the physical characteristics defined in the ISO norm 7810 [7] and the recording techniques in the ISO norm 7811 [8][9]. There is various application of smart cards intrusion into our lives such as finances, telecommunications, health care, mass transit systems and contactless smart cards, loyalty programs, identification and security, student cards and government [14]. To various degrees, all applications can benefit from the added features and security that smart cards provide. Smart cards have been applied to a variety of functions, including the identification of the cardholder; the authentication of card-holder's authority to conduct a transaction, the transaction itself and the data representing the transaction; the encryption and decryption of messages; data storage and data [5]. Among the fast growing usage of new technologies, smart card technology has an outstanding growth and making its way worldwide into the hands and wallets of everyone [12]. According to [11] one of the factors that could effect on technology acceptance is awareness so it is understood that for successfully implementation of smart card technology, awareness should be addressed. In other words, in order to increase the level of smart card usage and user satisfaction, the emphasis on aspects that may affect on user acceptance should be raised [13]. Aware

ness can effect on user satisfaction and consequently on user acceptance of smart card technology [11], as a result, to be able to increase the user awareness of smart card technology, first, the user awareness should be examined. This paper is going to investigate the user awareness of smart card technology and assess its influence on smart card satisfaction. Therefore, in the following a brief discussion on awareness dimension is prepared. Furthermore we outline our empirical assessment introducing the applied methodology and presenting our main results.

WARENESS COMPONENTS

Hamed Taherdoost is with the Islamic Azad University, Semnan Branch, Semnan, Iran. Shamsul Sahibuddin is with the Advanced Informatics School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Neda Jalaliyoon is with the Islamic Azad University, Semnan Branch, Semnan, Iran.

Smart card implementation must be clear to the users or cardholders, or at least it has minimal impact on them. Technology should be introduced to people and they have to be aware of its characteristics, features, and advantages. Also user awareness is a key to act against fraud and identity theft. The users need to understand what the card is doing; sometimes users do not know how they should use their cards and even what the advantages of using them are, and how they can benefit users. Obviously, different applications involve different users behavior so they should be aware of the usage and application of smart cards [13]. [16] defined awareness as the information of computing environment characteristics that are needed to perform adaptations. Adaptive applications are not only interested in their own awareness information, but also the awareness of their peers. They [16] also summarized the types of awareness which includes user awareness, application awareness, network awareness, device awareness and environment awareness. User awareness measure the users high level expectations of a service by specifying their preferences [10]. As said by [11], awareness is defined as the degree to which an individual are aware about the technology. Awareness about technology reason and motivate users

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to look forward to try smart card technology, and at the same time enjoy the variety of benefits that the system provides [2]. One of the important things to be considered is to increase users awareness of the smart card and its advantages [2]. Having a general knowledge and knowing what features and benefits the smart card technology has is a considerable issue and it can influence on intention to adopt the technology [14][13]. Awareness refers to the effort in providing knowledge and improving understanding of the smart card. Being aware of the technology will improve users judgment and their ability in using the system in a secured manner [4]. Knowledge status refers to how well one is aware of what is available, and is linked to the introduced concept of awareness [13]. Providing security training and awareness programs could help users of the system better understand the purpose for security and recognize their respective responsibilities in safeguarding the security of the system [1]. Furthermore being aware about the security vulnerabilities and security risks can assist users to avoid these kinds of actions [14]. Widespread the smart card awareness, education and training are the critical success factors to enforce the adoption of the smart card technology [10]. [2] recocommend some efforts to be included in increasing the awareness such as develop a nationwide campaign to promote the new smart card for different community segments; using newspapers, road banners, television, Internet and other medias to convey information about the smart card; more press conferences and visit to schools and universities to enlighten the young generation to use the smart card; provide guidelines for the usage and advantages and provide the services of issuing the cards in place of work in significant corporations, governmental organizations, private and public schools; and universities [10].

participated in this study. As it is shown in Table 1, the number of male and female participating in the survey is almost equal.
Table 1: Gender

Table 2 shows the participants per age distribution. According to this Table only 1.5% are above 35 and the most of respondents are between 21-25 years old.
Table 2: Age distribution

Considering the level of education, 13.7% chose diploma degree, 78.6% stated that they are doing their bachelor and less than 8% of them doing either Master or PhD degree (Table 3).
Table 3: respondents education

3 METHODOLOGY
In order to do the evaluation a questionnaire was developed and distributed among the 720 university students and 688 were returned. Students were chosen because they are among the most informed group of people in the society about the smart card or similar technologies. Survey included two parts. The first part contained questions about respondents demographic and the second section was about their awareness and satisfaction. Liker scale has been chosen for this questionnaire. Regarding the reliability of the survey, a value of 0.7 was chosen as an acceptable value for Cronbachs alpha [6] and the Cronbachs alpha for satisfaction, adoption and awareness are 0.73, 0.81 and 0.79 which are reliable.

4 RESULTS
Before starting the analysis of the responses, to give readers a better vision about respondents some descriptive statistics about the personal information of the respondents were prepared. As mentioned earlier, 688 students

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

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Table 4: Students familiarity with smart card technology

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

smart card. Additionally, near nine out of ten participants registered that being aware about the smart card system and services significantly affect on being satisfied 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 it. Then again, the user satisfaction of smart card technology was measured. As 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 versus only 0.7% disagree or strongly disagree. Furthermore, almost nine out of ten of the participants (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 satisfaction and acceptance items

The second part of the survey includes items regarding the smart card awareness, satisfaction and acceptance factors. Table 6 shows the frequency 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 systems. The startling result is that near 20% of respondents even do not have enough knowledge to operate

Table 8 illustrates that respondents who are studying 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 it, so it is suggested that some other modules could be offered by faculties to increase their students information and knowledge regarding

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

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fresh technologies and smart card technology as well.

CONCLUSION

Table 8: Crosstab of students field of study and smart card awareness

The correlation is one of the most common and most useful 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 Spearmans correlation was calculated using SPSS software. As it is revealed in Table 9, satisfaction and awareness items have the positive and significant correlation at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Furthermore, awareness items have influence adoption positively and significantly.

In order to use any new technology, first, it is needed to have knowledge and information about the advantages, features, characteristics and applications of it. Therefore, being aware about the technology can motivate consumers to accept any fresh technologies [13]. Awareness about technology cause users to look forward to try technology and at the same time enjoys the various benefits that the system provides [2][14]. Being aware about smart card can help users to understand the technology and it can influence on successful applying smart card technology in society. Findings of this research show that users are not well 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 function of smart card, ways and reasons to protect the card [14]. In addition, it was illustrated that awareness has a significant and positive effect on user satisfaction and consequently on adoption. It means that with increasing the level of awareness, the level of user satisfaction will be increased [13] and since, satisfaction of the computer system will have a direct effect on usage [12] therefore the acceptance rate will be rised. Awareness about technology cause users to look forward to try 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

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aware of the technology will improve users judgment and their ability in using the system in a secured manner [3][13].

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