Impact of contextual factors on smartphone applications use

Abstract

The development of methodologies and techniques to evaluate smartphones usability is an emerging topic in the scientific community and triggers discussions about which methodology is most appropriate. The lack of consensus is due to the inherent difficulty on capturing context data in the scenarios where the experiments take place and on relating them to the results found. This work aims to correlate potential usability problems in mobile applications with contextual factors that may occur during users’ interactions on different devices, such as luminosity, device screen resolution, and the user’s activity while interacting with the application. The methodology applied to carry out a field experiment take the following steps: identification of contextual factors that may influence users’ interaction; use of the UXEProject infrastructure to support the automatic capture of applications’ context data; implementation of long term experiments with real users using three different mobile applications over almost one year period. In this paper, we present and discuss the results obtained during this study.