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

Mobile applications and services increasingly assist us in our daily life situations, fulfilling our needs for information, com-munication, entertainment or leisure. However, user accep-tance of a mobile application depends on at least two con-ditions; 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 in-fluencing 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 differ-ent 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 re-lation to the underlying quantitative QoS. In our approach we collect both QoE and QoS measures through a combi-nation 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 mo-bile applications design