Best practices for capturing context in user experience studies in the wild

Abstract

In user experience studies, researchers' aim is to understand how the used system, the user's state and the context influence the user experience. Despite existing general guidance to conduct user studies real life contexts and a variety of field study methods for investigating user experience, specific and comprehensive guidance for capturing data about the circumstances that affect user experience is missing. In this paper, we present best practices for taking the context characteristics into account user experience studies conducted mobile and ubiquitous contexts. Based on a literature review and insights from our own field studies, we derived 18 best practices to cope with the real-world context the planning, data collection and analysis phases of user experience studies. The presented best practices support researchers and practitioners conducting more reliable UX studies in the wild.