Analysing user experience of personal mobile products through contextual factors

Abstract

Context plays a critical role in the user experience (UX) of mobile products. In UX studies, context is often seen as a single entity such as mobile context or car context. More fine-grained categorization of contextual factors is needed when we want to understand how context affects user experience. The purpose of our study was to adapt existing context and experience categorizations, and try out in practice how well these are suited for analyzing the user experience of mobile products. We conducted a ten-day field study where 21 participants reported their experiences of personal mobile products by writing experience reports. The reports were analyzed by using eight context categories to identify the contextual factors. Among these factors we determined the triggering context, which has the major influence on the most meaningful user experience described in a report. Our results show that having a detailed categorization for analyzing contextual factors is valuable for understanding how context affects user experience. This becomes practical in identifying the most meaningful user experiences among the reported ones. We propose that triggering context analysis should become a part of user experience studies of mobile products.