Universiti Teknologi Petronas

About: Universiti Teknologi Petronas is a education organization based out in Ipoh, Malaysia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Adsorption & Ionic liquid. The organization has 6127 authors who have published 11284 publications receiving 119400 citations.

Adoption of PHEV/EV in Malaysia: A critical review on predicting consumer behaviour

Abstract: Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs)/Electric vehicles (EVs) have recently been re-established in the transportation sector worldwide. These are enhancements over their ancestors in terms of both performance and electric driving range. Although the uptake of PHEV/EVs has been noteworthy in a short time frame amongst most governmental strategies, however, adoption is still a challenge. To date, public attitudes towards PHEV/EVs have been considered under very diverse conceptual frameworks. This paper reviews a growing body of peer-reviewed literatures assessing the factors affecting PHEV/EVs adoption. Malaysia is a major energy consuming country and, given the rapid growth in its economy, the energy consumption level is expected to continue growth. Hence, it is imperative that steps are taken to reduce harmful carbon emissions. Consequently, attempts are being initiated to popularise the use of PHEV/EVs as the main mode of transportation. However, it is important to take the three main features of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) model, namely the attitude towards the PHEV/EVs’ adoption, Subjective Norm (SN), and Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC) into account. The consumers’ concerns regarding the harmful effect of carbon emissions should be addressed. In this paper, the significance of encouraging the adoption of PHEVs/EVs is explained and some guidelines that might be followed in the upcoming researchers are mentioned. Furthermore, the implications for the design of effective measures to change the frail social and personal norms to choose PHEVs/EVs are also discussed. The collective outcome of ‘hyperbolic discounting’ has a direct effect between the consumers’ environmental concern-based intention and the actual adoption of PHEVs/EVs. Hence, this paper is aimed to conceptualise a framework created by amending the environmental concerns towards PHEVs/EVs. This will allow more academic consideration, and it may direct future researchers towards the empirical findings on environmental concerns and hyperbolic discounting through the proposed conceptual framework.

Usability Evaluation of the Smartphone User Interface in Supporting Elderly Users From Experts’ Perspective

Abstract: Despite the necessity for smartphones to be designed to better accommodate the elderly user, currently available smartphone user interfaces (UIs) do not appear to be optimized for that purpose. The objectives of this paper are to identify the potential usability problems among elderly adults when interacting with a smartphone’s UI, and recommend improvements to UI designs. The heuristic evaluation technique was used to determine the anticipated usability problems. SMASH, a set of 12 usability heuristics for smartphone and mobile applications was applied within a controlled environment, with five experts with the necessary competence to perform the evaluation. The results of the study indicated that there were 27 usability problems and 27 heuristic violations encountered. “Minimize the user’s memory load” and “match between system and real world” were the two most frequently violated heuristics. This study was complemented by testing with elderly people, and the results show that 79.17% of the problems experienced by the elderly were predicted by the experts. Usability problems were classified into four categories: 1) appearance; 2) language; 3) dialogue; and 4) information. Problems categories were further divided into sub-categories, and design solutions were suggested for each sub-category. This study’s findings contribute to understanding the problems that hinder elderly users in using smartphones and provide valuable feedback to designers of smartphone technology regarding improvements to the UI to better suit the elderly.