Design Of Ubiquitous Information Systems For Digital Natives

This paper focuses on how we can design Ubiquitous Information Systems (UIS) for digital natives. Digital natives are those who have grown up in a digital world, where the use of information and communications technologies is pervasive and ubiquitous, and where these technologies are used in organisational and personal contexts. Digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, like new technologies and they like change. This paper suggests that the rise of the digital native has profound implications for the design of information systems, and particularly UIS. Since many of our previous theories and models assume most users to be digital immigrants (who tend to resist new technology), a new set of design principles are needed for digital natives. We propose four key dimensions of UIS design for this new audience, namely, the system, the activity, the user, and the context that the system is designed to support. We conclude with a roadmap for the design and implementation of UIS for digital natives.