Factors influencing quality of experience of commonly-used mobile applications

Increasingly, we use mobile applications and services in our daily life activities, to support our needs for information, communication or leisure. However, user acceptance of a mobile application depends on at least two conditions; the application’s perceived experience and the appropriateness of the application to the user’s context and needs. Yet, we have a weak understanding of a mobile user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) and the factors influencing it. This paper presents 4 week long, 29 Android phone users study, where we collected both QoE and underlying network’s Quality of Service (QoS) measures through a combination of user, application and network data on the user’s phones. We aimed to derive and improve the understanding of users’ QoE for a set of widely used mobile applications in users’ natural environments and different daily context. We present data acquired in the study and discuss implications for mobile applications design