User Experience and Usage of Mobile Services in Novel Contexts

Abstract

Mobile devices and services are tightly woven into many aspects of modern society and culture. These devices and services fulfill diverse needs such as communication, information, and entertainment with an anywhere anytime philosophy. Despite this importance and ubiquity, mobile research has not thoroughly examined mobile usage and experience in all mobile contexts. Specifically, several understudied mobile contexts are novel and/or present practical difficulties for studying. This thesis explores three such contexts: multiple mobile devices (multidevice), multiple mobile networks, and long-term mobile services. Towards this goal, the thesis research leverages two unique empirical datasets collected from the USA and Finland and several modern simulation and statistical analysis methods including generalized logistic regression modeling and agent-based modeling. Given the diverse nature of the contexts, the research results are also diverse and primarily include context-specific insights. For example, for users with both smartphones and tablets, multidevice usage already represents a significant fraction (~50%) of all device usage time, therefore, illustrating the prevalence of such usage. Additionally, multidevice usage sessions show significant diversity thus emphasizing the need for multidevice apps to be highly personalized. In the multiple mobile network context, the user quality of experience benefits of fast switching between multiple networks are significant in most situations, whereas the benefits of using multiple networks simultaneously are more limited due to inefficient resource allocation. Finally, in the context of long-term mobile services, users satisfaction with such services at a given point in time depends partly on complex temporal phenomena spanning the service time frame such as the peak-end effect. Though even accounting for these phenomena only explains a fraction of the variation in user satisfaction thus motivating future research. Overall, the results present initial data points for these contexts that hopefully spur additional research and allow for more robust theory creation. Furthermore, several of the individual results are interesting for mobile ecosystem players such as consumers, national regulators, mobile network operators, and device vendors.