Studying the experience of mobile applications used in different contexts of daily life

Abstract

Mobile applications and services increasingly assist us in our daily life situations, fulfilling our needs for information, communication, entertainment or leisure. However, user acceptance of a mobile application depends on at least two conditions; the application's perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) and the appropriateness of the application to the user's situation and context. Yet, there is generally a weak understanding of a mobile user's QoE and the factors influencing it. The mobile user's experience is related to the Quality of Service (QoS) provided by the underlying service and network infrastructures, which provides a starting point for our work. We present "work-in-progress" results from an ongoing study of Android phone users. In this study, we aim to derive and improve understanding of their QoE in different situations and daily life environments. In particular, we evaluate the user's qualitative QoE for a set of widely used mobile applications in the users' natural environments and different contexts, and we analyze this experience and its relation to the underlying quantitative QoS. In our approach we collect both QoE and QoS measures through a combination of user, application and network input from mobile phones. We present initial data acquired in the study and derived from that, a set of preliminary implications for mobile applications design.