Analysing User Experience of Personal Mobile Products
through Contextual Factors
Hannu Korhonen Juha Arrasvuori
Nokia Research Nokia Research
P.O. Box 1000 P.O. Box 1000
00045 Nokia Group, Finland 00045 Nokia Group, Finland
+358 50 483 5623 +358 50 486 7978
hannu.j.korhonen@nokia.com juha.arrasvuori@nokia.com
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.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]:
User Interfaces, User-centered Design.
General Terms
Human Factors.
Keywords
Context, Triggering Context, Mobile Context, User Experience,
Personal Mobile Products, Experience Report.
1. INTRODUCTION
User experience (UX) is a concept established during the past
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Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila
Tampere University of Technology
P.O. Box 589
33101 Tampere, Finland
+358 40 849 0731
kaisa.vaananen-vainio-
mattila@tut.fi
decade to describe the holistic nature of users’ interaction with
information technology products and the associated services.
Many user experience models and frameworks have been
proposed which explain aspects that affect the overall UX of a
product [12], [16], [21], [24]. One common trait in these models
and frameworks is that they recognize the importance of context
as a central aspect influencing user experience. There are multiple
definitions of what context is and how it influences the use of
interactive products [5], [7], [8], [10]. Especially in user
experience studies involving mobile products, understanding
contextual factors is important because they are used in greatly
varying contexts.
Although the importance of context has been acknowledged in
UX research, very little knowledge exists on how the different
contextual factors influence user experience in a certain situation.
One of the reasons is that context is often defined as a single
influencing factor, such as car context or mobile context [20].
Jumisko-Pyykkö and Vainio have made an extensive literature
review of previous work regarding what contextual factors are
involved in studies of mobile devices [20]. Social and physical
contexts have been the most commonly studied factors (66% and
61% of the studies, respectively). The other contextual factors
were less frequently involved. Wigelius and Väätäjä showed that
multiple contextual factors are usually present in the mobile
context [30], and therefore, it would be important to study context
holistically to determine which factors are influencing the user
experience in a particular situation.
Our approach is to make the influence of context in UX more
concrete by defining a detailed context categorization and seeking
out the most important factor – the triggering context – that
affects user experience in a specific situation. The triggering
context facilitates identifying the most meaningful experience, i.e.
the core experience, for a user in an episode of usage.
Understanding the influence of context is valuable for designing
products that take into account how changes in the context
strengthen or distract positive user experience.
We conducted a ten-day field study to explore the contexts in
which personal mobile products are used. 21 participants wrote
story-like reports of their experiences with personal mobile
products such as mobile phones, portable music players, and heart
rate monitors. Each experience report was analyzed by first
identifying the contextual factors appearing in the report and
determining the triggering context among these factors. Then, a
predefined categorization of playful experiences [2] was used to
articulate (i.e., to name) the core experience in the report.
The contribution of this work to user experience research is that a
detailed analysis of context provides specific information on the
factors that influence the meaningful user experience with a
product. In this paper, we present a categorization that allows
dividing any context description into eight types of contextual
factors. We also propose that triggering context analysis should
be part of user experience studies.
2. RELATED WORK
Understanding how context affects the interaction or user
experiences of a mobile system is very important for product
development. There are countless amounts of studies which report
how mobile devices, applications and services have been
evaluated in different contexts of use. The studies have ranged
from specific domains (e.g. museums, hospitals) and different
user groups (e.g. teenagers, visually impaired) to studying various
tasks (e.g. writing messages while driving, navigating in an urban
environment) that users perform with these systems.
The objective of these studies has usually been to understand
individual contextual factors and overcome challenges that the
contextual factors set for interaction design. For example, Barnard
et al. have studied how changes in contextual factors (task type,
motion and lighting level) affect the performance of mobile
device users [4]. In their study, the users were operating a PDA
and performed reading comprehension and word search tasks. The
results indicate that changes in the contextual factors will also
affect the interaction with a mobile device.
Jones and Marsden argue that the evaluation of a mobile system
should take place in an actual context [19]. However, it is
sometimes difficult to access the context of use or to include all
relevant contextual factors to the evaluation. For example,
Kjeldskov and Skov reported a study in which they developed a
mobile system to support safety-critical collaboration tasks on
board a container ship [22]. In this study, the evaluations were
arranged in a laboratory setting, because it was not possible to use
the actual context, that is, a real container ship. For these kinds of
evaluations, it would be beneficial to recognize which contextual
factors are essential for the evaluation and might have significant
influence of user experience.
Although it has been acknowledged that context affects the user
experience of a product, which contextual factors among the all
possible factors are actually affecting the user experience of
mobile products has not been studied extensively. Mallat et al.
have studied the acceptance of a mobile ticketing service and
concluded that context was a significant determinant for consumer
intention of using a service [25]. They reported that the service
was found useful when users were in a hurry or the need for a
ticket was unexpected, other alternatives for purchasing tickets
were not available, or there was a queue at the sales point. All
these reasons imply that there are different contextual factors
which drive the use of the service, but the contextual factors were
not identified in the study.
Previous studies provide valuable information on what kinds of
contextual factors are involved in the mobile context or the user
experience of mobile systems, but they do not describe in detail
the relationship between these two aspects. After reviewing an
extensive amount of previous studies of mobile devices, Jumisko-
Pyykkö and Vainio stated that, in most of the studies, context of
use is mainly understood as a relatively static phenomenon and
the studies consider only few contextual factors, such as the social
and physical context. Other relevant factors are less explored [20].
This might present a limited view of the context. In our study, the
aim is to identify which contextual factors are especially
important to a meaningful user experience and what is the
resulting experience affected by the context.
3. CONTEXT CATEGORIES FOR
STUDYING MOBILE UX
Location was one of the first contextual factors to be studied in
the development of context-aware systems [28]. In addition to
location, researchers have also recognized that there are other
factors that influence how users experience mobile systems.
Although many researchers (e.g. [9], [19], [23], [27], [29]) have
identified similar kinds of contextual factors, their categorizations
of the factors have not been consistent. A similar category name
might implicate that the categories are the same, but in reality,
they might contain a very different set of contextual factors.
Schmidt et al. presented that context could be divided into two
main categories: human factors and physical environment [29].
Under these main categories, there would be several
subcategories. Subcategories of the Human Factors category
include user, social environment and task. Subcategories of the
Physical Environment category include condition, infrastructure,
and location. Maguire noted that before any product can be
evaluated properly, it is necessary to understand the context of
use [23]. He defined the main aspects of context as user, task, and
environment (including required hardware and software,
workplace, organizational structure and job design).
Researchers have also been interested in what contextual factors
affect the user experience of a mobile system. Roto studied
mobile browsing, and the different contextual factors of mobile
context were categorized to physical, social, temporal, and task
context [27]. Wigelius and Väätäjä presented three case studies of
mobile work, and they studied construction sites, taxi drivers and
journalists in their typical work context and what kinds of
contextual factors are present [30]. The findings of the study
indicate that multiple factors affect user experience - including the
social, spatial, temporal, infrastructural, and task contexts.
Jumisko-Pyykkö and Vainio have defined a descriptive model of
the context of use between a user and a mobile system. [20]. They
have reviewed a large amount of recent studies of mobile systems
and what kinds of contextual factors were studied. The model has
five categories: the physical, task, social, temporal, and technical
and information contexts. Furthermore, these categories include a
number of subcategories.
In order to evaluate which contextual factors affect the particular
user experience of a product, it is important to use distinguishable
context categories which provide sufficient granularity. For our
study, we selected the context categorization defined by Guarneri
et al. [15], which has been developed from the viewpoint of
mobile service personalization. It consists of eight context
categories: Environment, Personal, Task, Social, Spatio-
Temporal, Device, Service, and Access Network.
There are a few advantages in this categorization compared to
other presented categorizations. Firstly, the categories of
Environment, Personal, Task, and Social are relatively
independent and they do not contain overlapping contextual
factors. Secondly, in previous categorizations the required
infrastructure of the mobile system was often considered as one
context category, but in this categorization, it is divided into three
categories (Device, Service, and Access Network). Roto notes
that a mobile system consists of different aspects that affect user
experience, and they should be distinguished in the UX studies
[27]. Finally, time and location are combined in the Spatio-
Temporal context category. In previous categorizations, location
was placed in various categories. In the following, we present a
brief definition of each context category.
3.1 Environment Context
The Environment context (often referred to as Physical context)
describes entities that surround the user. Usually, it describes
attributes such as lighting, temperature, noise level, weather
conditions, and humidity that a user can sense [15], [19], [20],
[27], [29]. Additionally, all kinds of artifacts, animals and people
(who are not part of Social context) are regarded as contextual
factors in the Environment context.
3.2 Personal Context
The Personal context describes the state of the user. It consists of
two parts: physiological context (e.g., pulse, blood pressure,
glucose level, retina pattern, and hair color) and mental context
(e.g., mood, expertise, and stress) [15]. In categorizations which
focus only on the context of use, this category is usually omitted
because it describes the user’s characteristics (e.g. [20], [27]).
3.3 Task Context
The Task context describes what the user is currently engaged in.
It includes tasks, actions, activities, or events that the user is
involved in. The task context can also include some other
persons’ tasks within the situation, which somehow influence the
primary user [15].
The Task context describes tasks in relation to the user’s actions
of interacting with a device, which might be the primary or
secondary task. When interacting with the device is a primary
task, other tasks create interruptions to the interaction. If the
interaction with a device is a secondary task, it contributes to
multitasking that the user is doing. Both of these cases will affect
user experience. Jumisko-Pyykkö and Vainio also define the task
domain, which divides the situation of an interaction into goal-
oriented and action-oriented classes [20].
3.4 Social Context
The Social context encompasses the social aspects of the user’s
context, describing information about friends, neutrals, enemies,
neighbors, co-workers, and relatives [15]. The Social context also
takes into account the role that other people play in the context. A
certain role can be played in a specific social arena like the
workplace [15]. The Social context also describes the user’s
willingness to participate in a social situation [27]. Therefore, the
user might have an active or passive role depending on the case.
Furthermore, the Social context may include components of
interpersonal interaction, and cultural values, norms, and attitudes
[20].
3.5 Spatio-Temporal Context
The two essential contextual factors of in this category are time
and location. Location is a factor that is usually included in the
Environment context (e.g. [9], [20], [29]). Roto states that “[t]ime
alone does not directly affect the user experience” [27]. It is more
that time affects other attributes, and these attributes then affect
user experience. Location can be understood in a similar fashion.
There are certain attributes such as artifacts and people in a
location, and these attributes affect user experience, not the
location itself. This might be one of the reasons why location is
typically placed in the Environment context category.
However, having a separate Spatio-Temporal context category is
justified, because there are attributes such as speed, direction,
distance, and shape (of buildings or terrain) which do not belong
to other categories, but they are related to time and location.
Jumisko-Pyykkö and Vainio augmented the temporal aspect with
components such as duration; peaks of the user’s interaction in
relation to time; user’s actions before, during, and after
interaction; relative temporal tensions of actions (e.g. hurrying or
waiting); and synchronism of actions [20].
3.6 Device Context
Guarneri et al. define the Terminal context in a rather specific
way as equipment of a network providing an access to services
[15]. Their Terminal context includes attributes of the terminal
(screen size, weight, memory), interfaces (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth),
terminal type, terminal addresses, media supported (audio, video,
text, etc.), and services supported [15]. Roto includes factors like
appeal, battery life, processing power and input devices as
characteristics of the device [27].
These definitions, however, are strongly focused on
telecommunication devices. Instead of Terminal context, we have
renamed the category Device context to broaden its scope to
include stand-alone devices that are used without connection to
another device or service. The Device context also includes
informational artifacts, and the interoperability between devices
[20]. Media content stored on the device belongs to this category.
3.7 Service Context
The Service context describes the properties of an online service
[15], and interoperability between devices and services [20].
Many personal devices are connected to a remote service, which
provides additional features or a place for storing data.
It may be difficult to distinguish between the Device context and
Service context, as the latter takes place within the former. To
clarify this, applications that require a network connection to send
and receive data are regarded by us as services and thus belong to
the Service context category. During the analysis, the proper
context category depends on what application features are used.
3.8 Access Network Context
Devices are connected to each other or services either directly
through close-proximity radio like Bluetooth, or via cellular
networks (e.g. GSM and UMTS) or WLAN. The Access Network
context describes the characteristics of the network, such as
network coverage, connection availability, speed, cost, and trust,
that are relevant for user experience [19], [27]. The access
network connects the user’s device to the services or other
devices [15], thus enabling interoperability [20].
4. STUDY PROCESS
We have approached the question of how contextual factors
influence the user experience of personal mobile products by
obtaining experience reports written by the users during a ten-day
field study. In this section, we explain the central concepts and
methods for analysis, as well as the process of the study.
4.1 Participants
We recruited 21 persons (10 female, 11 male) through a common
distribution list to participate in the study. Initially, we specified
that we were interested in people who had used their personal
mobile device for at least six months, but in a few cases, the
participant had started to use a new product recently. We
expected the participants to be familiar with their product’s
features and the product use to be an integral part of their daily
routines.
The average age of the participants was 34 years, ranging from 25
to 46 years. Most of the participants were experienced users of the
products. On average, the participants had used their personal
products for 17 months. There were few participants (14%) who
had used a product for less than six months. Others had owned
their product longer, and 25% of the participants had used the
personal product actively for more than two years.
4.2 Personal Mobile Products
The participants could propose their own favorite personal
devices for the study. The repertoire of the devices selected
included smart phones, internet tablets, MP3 players, heart rate
monitors, miniature translators, and digital cameras.
As smart phones are feature-rich devices, we asked the
participants to select a certain application or service that they
would focus on during the study. The participants chose to report
on applications including messaging, photography, web browsing,
social media, music listening, video watching, personal
navigation, file sharing, e-book reading, and fitness monitoring.
4.3 Data Collection
Isomursu et al. concluded that some of the existing user
experience evaluation methods have difficulties in capturing the
dynamic nature of interaction and the influence of context [18].
Researchers have also noted that user experience should be
studied in a holistic way and in addition to momentary
experiences, users’ subjective views to the experiences should be
taken into account [13], [31]. Norman [26] has proposed that the
most important experiences elicited by products are those that the
user remembers, considers as the most meaningful moments of
use, and which the user wants to express to others.
For these reasons, we decided to use a data collection method that
would allow us to obtain rich experience descriptions from the
users. Experience reports are a form of storytelling, by which
users report meaningful or memorable events with their products.
The experiences can be either positive or negative. Storytelling
has been regarded as an effective way to gain a holistic view of
the user experience [12], [13]. Users remember and organize
experiences as stories, and those stories enable humans to
communicate experiences in different situations [12]. Wright et al.
also state that recounting experiences is part of making sense of
the experience [31].
We wanted to obtain users’ descriptions of events related to their
selected personal products, including experiences that their
interaction with the device resulted in. Experience reports enable
this without requiring participants to write complete stories with
all typical story elements [14]. Instead, participants are free to
describe significant events of their daily use of a product as they
would tell about it to a peer. We asked participants to write about
the actual usage, but also about their personal feelings, values and
interests when using a product. In addition, we were interested in
the situation where the story happened or other contextual
information related to the event.
The resulting experience reports were typically describing a usage
episode which lasted from some minutes to a couple of hours.
The reports are written from the single user viewpoint, that of the
person reporting the experiences that the personal product has
elicited from him or her. The reports were less than half of an A4
sheet of typed text. They may not necessarily be complete
descriptions of the user experience of a product, but they
communicate salient parts of an experience that participants
consider important and meaningful.
4.4 Context Categorization
On basis of the eight context categories defined above, we
consolidated the set of questions presented in Table 1 for
identifying contextual factors from experience reports during the
analysis.
Table 1 Questions for identifying contextual factors
Context Identifying questions
category
Environmental What are the properties of the physical
environment surrounding the user?
Personal What feelings does the user describe?
Social What other people there are around the user
and how are they influencing the user?
Task What activity is the user primarily engaged
in? What is the user secondarily engaged in?
How do the secondary tasks influence the
primary task?
Spatio- Does the user’s physical environment
Temporal change, and what influence does the change
have? How much time passes, and what
changes occur over time?
Device How does the user describe the properties of
the device? How does the user describe her
interactions with the device: what is the user
doing and how?
Service How does the user describe the properties of
the service? How does the user describe her
interactions with the service or interactions
mediated by the service?
Access Network How does the user describe the information
exchange connection between her device and
other devices or services?
4.5 Experience Categorization
Few UX models offer detailed categorizations for describing or
articulating possible user experiences. There is a lack of a
common vocabulary in user experience research. However,
researchers in interactive art and digital game domains have
identified distinct sets of pleasurable and playful user experiences
which they present as experience frameworks or categorizations
[6], [2].
The Playful Experience (PLEX) framework is a categorization
defining a set of 22 experiences (Table 2). By ‘playful
experience’ we mean experiences that are mostly non-goal-
oriented and mainly evoked by fun or the pleasurable aspects of
using a product. Playfulness may also include temporary negative
experiences as part of the overall UX. Playfulness can either be
planned in the product design, or it can arise from the user's
mindset during the interaction [2]. These categories have been
previously used to identify playful user experiences with digital
games [2] With the present study, we wanted to find out if the
categories are applicable to describing experiences elicited by
other kinds of products as well. We believe that this
categorization can be used to describe all kinds of experiences of
product use because, according to psychologist Michael J. Apter
[1], playfulness is a user’s state of the mind, and all kinds of
activities can be experienced in a playful state or in a serious
state.
Table 2 Playful Experience categorization
Experience Description
4.6 Identifying Triggering Context and Core
Experience
Forlizzi and Battarbee have noted that interaction with a product
is a constant stream of interaction sequences and emotions, and it
causes emotional and behavioral changes in a user [11].
Contextual factors play an important role in these changes, and
they can amplify previous negative or positive experience, alter
positive experience into negative experience, or vice versa. We
call the single contextual factor that significantly alters the
experience stream into positive or negative direction as triggering
context.
The main objective in our analysis is to identify the triggering
context in terms of how it changes the experience. Our
assumption is that when writing experience reports, users
emphasize the aspect that was meaningful or memorable for them,
and worth sharing with others. This we call a core experience.
The triggering context helps to locate where the core experience
occurs in a report.
Figure 1 illustrates a fictional experience stream as it could be
reconstructed from an experience report (concrete examples of
actual experience reports are presented below). The illustration
starts with a positive experience, but then some contextual factor
changes the experience into a negative one. The experience stays
negative until the end of the story. In this example, the contextual
factor that steers the experience in the negative direction can be
seen as the triggering context for a negative core experience.
Triggering Context
Positive

Captivation Forgetting one’s surroundings

Core Experience
Challenge Testing abilities in a demanding task
Time
Competition Contest with oneself or an opponent
Negative

Experience stream
Completion Finishing a major task, closure
Control Dominating, commanding, regulating
Cruelty Causing mental or physical pain Figure 1 Illustration of the appearance of a triggering context
and the core experience in an experience report
Discovery Finding something new or unknown
Eroticism A sexually arousing experience 4.7 Procedure
Exploration Investigating an object or situation At the beginning of the study, we arranged a one-hour
introduction session for participants in order to describe the
Expression Manifesting oneself creatively
purpose of the study and to instruct on how to report experiences.
Fantasy An imagined experience The participants were advised to write reports during the same
Fellowship Friendship, communality or intimacy day or on the following day in order to faithfully capture the user
experience. The participants could use either English or Finnish
Humor Fun, joy, amusement, jokes, gags for writing. The reports were sent to the authors through email.
Nurture Taking care of oneself or others During the first couple of days, we monitored the reports. If we
noticed that some reports were reporting merely use scenarios,
Relaxation Relief from bodily or mental work usability problems or bugs in the devices, we advised the
Sensation Excitement by stimulating senses participant to pay more attention to experiential aspects in their
reports. This happened with a couple of participants.
Simulation An imitation of everyday life
After the reporting period, the experience reports were analyzed
Submission Being part of a larger structure
independently by two researchers. The analysis was started by
Subversion Breaking social rules and norms listing all contextual factors that were present in a report. We
Suffering Experience of loss, frustration, anger referred to a set of questions (Table 1) to identify the contextual
factors. Many contextual factors were for describing factual
Sympathy Sharing emotional feelings aspects of the situation, e.g. the scenery, without any associations
Thrill Excitement derived from risk, danger with experiences. The triggering context was selected among the
listed contextual factors by identifying the clearest expression of
an experience stated in the Personal context category, and then
tracing it back to the contextual factor which seemed to cause, i.e.
“trigger,” it.
The contextual factor within the Personal context that was
identified to correlate with a triggering context was analyzed to
determine the core experience in the report. The words and
expressions that described the most meaningful experience were
crosschecked with the Playful Experience (PLEX) categorization
(Table 2) and the more extensive descriptions of those categories.
Core experiences that did not match to any of the PLEX
categories were given a descriptive label and were noted as
potential supplemental categories for the PLEX framework in our
future work. As an end result of the analysis, we ended up with
pairs of triggering contexts and core experiences.
After the individual evaluators’ analyses were completed, both
results were combined and conflicting cases were discussed to
find agreement on the identified triggering contexts. Although the
evaluators shared an understanding of the triggering context and
PLEX categories, it was discovered that the individual
interpretations varied, and the Kappa value (.315) showed only
moderate agreement for the initially defined triggering contexts.
This was mainly due to incomplete instructions on defining the
triggering context during the initial analysis. In addition, some
experience reports had multiple possible interpretations and
therefore, there were two possible triggering contexts in one
experience report. In the results section, we present the combined
interpretation with all conflicting cases solved.
5. RESULTS
In this section, we describe the main results of our study. First, we
show how the participants reported their experiences of using the
personal products. We then describe the analysis of two example
reports to show how to identify the triggering context from the
story. Finally, we show what kinds of contextual factors were
identified as triggering contexts from all experience reports.
5.1 Reporting Activity
The participants were active in their experience reporting, and we
received a total of 116 experience reports during the continuous
10-day reporting period. The reporting period started on
Wednesday and ended on Friday the following week. The
participants were also reporting their experiences during the
weekend. Both female and male participants were equally active
in reporting their experiences. 53% of reports were written by
male participants. Participants wrote 5.52 reports on average
(median value was 6), ranging from one report to 13 reports.
5.2 Experience Report Analysis
In the following, we present two examples of analysis to identify
the contextual factors, triggering context, and core experience in
experience reports. The reports are presented as written by the
participants. The underlining highlights aspects that were
considered important by the researchers when analyzing the
reports.
5.2.1 Example Report #1 (female, 34 years)
“I was very bored. My husband was at work and I had to wait for
him in a car. Luckily it was a big van so I was able to sit back and
relax. But I was bored. Then I remembered that I have a movie in
my phone. Spider Man 3 comes with the N95 8GB phone. First it
took a while to find where it is and I chose the wrong file which I
opened. I didn't mind about those first problems because I was in
no hurry. Then I was able to start watching the movie file. I
changed the screen to landscape mode and increased the volume.
I was surprised how good the sound quality was. I was glad that
the sounds were rather clear and I was able to hear all kinds of
background sounds in addition to the people’s voices. Not exactly
Dolby Digital surround sounds but a nice surprise anyway. Then I
needed to start wind the movie forward because I wasn't
interested in seeing the intro and the names. The actual movie
started after 3 minutes of intro and it was a bit frustrating to wind
until that point. The winding was rather slow because I had to
stop and check if the intro had already ended or not. Feels like it
took a long time to get to that point where the movie started. Then
I started to watch the movie. I was again positively surprised that
there were no typical wide-screen movie mode black bars in the
upper and lower parts of the screen - the movie is shown in full
screen. Before I was able to just relax and watch I had to find
some good place for the phone so that I didn't need to hold it in
my hand. Finding that place took a while. I was able to watch the
movie, but it felt a bit annoying. Finally I managed to build some
kind of support for the phone so I was able to free my both hands
and relax. I wasn't able to watch the whole movie but when my
husband came back to the car I was happy that I managed to find
some entertaining activity during that one hour I had to spend in
the car. I was in a good mood because of that.”
In this experience report, the user is interacting with a smart
phone and wants to watch a movie stored on the device. In the
beginning of the report, the Personal, Task, Social, and Spatio-
Temporal contextual factors can be clearly established as follows:
the user is initially bored as she has to wait in a car for an hour for
her husband to return. During the primary task of waiting, an
additional task emerges as the user builds a support for the device
so she doesn’t have to hold it in her hand. Finally, the user is in a
good mood because of watching the movie, and especially due to
the positive audio-visual quality offered by the device. Contextual
factors identified in the report are summarized in Table 3.
Although the user describes multiple contextual factors in the
report, the Device context seemed to be the most influential.
Interacting with movie playback controls was frustrating for the
user. However, we interpreted this as a minor and passing
experience. The clearest experience expression in the report was
that the user was positively surprised because of the good video
and audio quality of the device. Therefore, the Device context
was defined as the triggering context in this story.
The core experience can be derived from the triggering context.
The user was enjoying the good quality of sound and video when
watching a movie. The PLEX categorization describes that when
something is eliciting excitement through the stimulation of one
or several senses, which are in this case visual and auditory, the
user is experiencing Sensation [2] This experience is directly
related to interaction with a device, as the user is accessing and
watching media provided by the device.
Table 3 Summary of contextual factors in report #1. Highlight
of table rows indicates the triggering context (under Device
context) and the contextual factor to determine the core
experience (under Personal context).
Context category Contextual factors
Environmental The user is in a big van
Personal Initially the user is very bored
The user did not mind opening the wrong
file because she was not in a hurry
The user felt frustrated of rewinding and
skipping the intro of the movie
The user was positively surprised of good
video and audio quality
Finally the user is in a good mood
Social Husband is at work and user has to wait for
him alone
Task Primary: Waiting for husband
Secondary: Building a stand for device,
which supports watching movie and
relaxing
Spatio-Temporal Sitting still for one hour
Device Nokia N95-8GB, Spider Man 3 movie
stored on device
Troubles with starting and forwarding
movie playback
Good quality of sound and video
Service N/A
Access Network N/A
5.2.2 Example Report #2 (female, 43 years)
“Teenagers are to summer cottages like… like… well, like oil is to
water. The other summer, my in-laws with their 16-year-old
daughter rented a beautiful cottage by the lake. But was their
daughter happy? No way, being buried there in the middle of
nowhere, while all her friends were in the city. And there was
wailing and gnashing of teeth. But then I, the cool Auntie, arrived
with my E90 + N810. Now the daughter could browse here and
there and e-mail with all her friends. There she was, all curled up
there in the corner of the sofa, quietly and smiling, tapping and
clicking away. She was happy, her parents were happy, we were
happy. Again, peace and tranquility reigned amongst us.”
In the story, the user is taking care of a teenager’s social well-
being by allowing her to use mobile devices and a mobile internet
connection to contact her friends. The Environmental factor is a
beautiful cottage which is isolated from the rest of the world.
Stating that the story occurred “the other summer” suggests that
Spatio-Temporal factors are unimportant in the story. The Social
context factors describe the teenage girl who is initially unhappy
because she is out of contact with her friends. The initial Personal
context factor is that the user feels sorry for the unhappy teenager.
The primary task context for the user becomes making the
teenager happy. The tools for this can be found in the Device
context, i.e. Nokia E90 smart phone and N810 internet tablet. The
Service context includes e-mail and web service. Although not
explicitly stated in the report, the Access Network context factor is
apparently mobile data (e.g. GPRS). Nevertheless, the access
network is powerful enough for the services to be used. At the end
of the story, the user’s Personal context has changed to happy as
she feels good about herself and even “cool”. The contextual
factors are summarized in Table 4.
Table 4 Summary of contextual factors in report #2
Context Contextual factors
category
Environmental Beautiful cottage by the lake, in the middle
of nowhere
Personal Initially, the user is feeling sorry for the
unhappy teenager
Finally the user feels happy and “cool”
Social Initially, the teenager is unhappy
Task Primary: Making the teenager happy
Spatio-Temporal Some past summer
Device Nokia E90 and N810
Service Using e-mail and web services makes the
teenager happy
Access Network Mobile data
In this report, the Environmental context, i.e. the isolation in the
cottage provides the background for understanding the
experience, but it is not the triggering context for the reported
user experience. The personal products are clearly used as mere
tools in the story for solving the task of making the teenager
happy. The reported experience seems not to be about interaction
as the details of interaction between the teenager and device are
not described. Although it can be argued that both Service and
Access Network aspects are necessary for providing happiness to
the teenager, as these provide the connection to her friends, the
report itself is written from a viewpoint that emphasizes the
Device context: ”But then I, the cool Auntie, arrived with my E90
+ N810”. The triggering context is the user feeling sorry for the
unhappy teenager, in other words, a Social contextual factor. This
prompts the user to help the teenager to feel happy. The PLEX
framework includes a category called Nurture [2] which is the
experience people get from taking care of others. Thus, nurture is
an appropriate interpretation of the core experience in the report.
5.3 Triggering Contexts
All experience reports were analyzed and their triggering contexts
and core experiences were identified through the procedure
presented previously. Usually, the participants had described
multiple contextual factors that had influenced the user
experience described in a report. Among these contextual factors
we identified one triggering context which defined a core
experience in that particular case. Eight of the 116 reports were
clearly seen as describing two core experiences in a single report,
and interpretations of those reports were split. Thus, 124 core
experiences were interpreted. The identified triggering contexts
are summarized in Figure 2.

Service
Social 8%
20%
Environment
8%
Personal
4%
Spatio-
Other
Temporal
Task 12% 4%
23%
Not identified
4%
Device Access
29% Network
0%
Figure 2 Occurrence of the triggering contexts in the
experience reports
The most frequently emerging triggering contexts were the
Device, Task, and Social categories. 72% of triggering contexts
belonged to these three categories. As the users usually had a task
they needed to accomplish, device features were quite often
determining whether they would be successful or not. Therefore,
Device and Task contexts were the most common triggering
contexts. In many reports, the participants were also describing
experiences determined by Social context. In those experience
reports where the Social context had an influence on the user
experience, the participants described how they needed to take
care of other persons in one way or another, and using their
personal device helped them to solve the situation conveniently.
Another typical case was that other person’s behavior prevented
the user from interacting with the device as they would have liked
and they needed to find alternative ways to do things or drop the
idea totally.
The Service and Environment context categories form the next
notable group of triggering contexts influencing core experiences.
Most of the personal products in the study were stand-alone
applications or products and they did not use the network in any
way. This is mainly the reason why the Device context was more
influential compared to Service context. The participants
described that the weather or noise level influenced their
experience of using a product, which are part of Environment
context.
The final group of context categories that affected core experience
was that consisting of the Personal and Spatio-Temporal contexts.
With heart rate monitors and fitness applications, the Personal
context was regarded few times as the triggering context. In these
reports, the participants were describing how their own physical
fitness affected the experience when they were using the products.
From the Spatio-Temporal context, participants considered that
pace and visualization of location in a navigation application were
triggering contexts for core experiences.
In five reports, no triggering context could be identified due to the
abstraction of the experience description. Access Network was
found as a contextual factor in several reports, but it was never
identified as a triggering context for the core experience.
5.4 Core Experiences
The analysis of the experience reported revealed that the
triggering contexts elicit very different kinds of core experiences
from users. For example, when the triggering context was the
Device context, the core experience was referring to 13 PLEX
categories. The Task context provided 11 different core
experiences and Social context was the triggering context for 8
different core experiences.
Overall, the most common core experiences found were Control
(13%), Fellowship (11%), Simulation (9%), and Discovery (9%).
Even though context categories triggered a large number of
different core experiences, not all PLEX categories were present
in the reports. Three PLEX categories did not appear at all as core
experience, namely Challenge, Cruelty, and Eroticism. In
addition, there were core experiences which could not be
articulated on the basis of PLEX categories. These core
experiences were labeled Satisfaction, Disappointment,
Attachment, Memory creation, Unsatisfied, Embarrassment, and
Empower. A more detailed analysis of core experiences in the
reports is presented by Arrasvuori et al. [3].
6. DISCUSSION
In order to understand user experience in a specific situation, it is
essential to identify the detailed contextual factors that influence
the experience. In different situations the user experience may be
different, even though a user is performing the same tasks and
using the product in a similar fashion. However, there are some
challenges to how the influence of a context can be captured in
analysis. Forlizzi and Battarbee describe experience as a constant
stream of interaction sequences that change user behavior and
emotions [11], and the challenge is to identify particular
experiences from the stream. Isomursu et al. have stated that
certain methods have difficulties in obtaining information about
the dynamic nature of the experience and the influence that
context has on the experience [18].
We approached these challenges by using experience reports to
gather data on the dynamic nature of user experience and on how
context influences it. In the experience reports we obtained, users
described episodes of their interaction with personal mobile
products, and their thoughts and feelings. These episodes lasted
from minutes to some hours of use. In our study, the reporting
activity was good, and we received 116 reports from 21
participants over a 10-day study period. The success with the
number of the reports probably stems from the fact that
participants were using their own personal product on a daily
basis, and therefore, it was easy to write about their experiences.
Participants were free to make the reports as long as they liked,
and to use their preferred language. We think that some of the
reports were more colorful and caught the details of user
experience better because of this freedom.
In previous studies, context has often been understood as a single
influencing factor, such as work context or mobile context [20].
As such, context becomes too abstract and may not be useful
when analyzing the influence context has on user experience. A
more fine-grained context classification is needed. On the basis of
Guarneri et al. [15], we defined a categorization with eight
distinct context categories. The categorization takes into account
the environment in which interaction occurs, the user or other
people who are involved in the interaction, other tasks that occur
around or at the same time, and spatial and temporal factors that
affect the interaction. In addition, there are separate categories for
Device, Service and Access Network. Throughout the analysis,
we identified the contextual factors in the experience reports by
referring to a set of questions relating to each context category
(Table 1).
The core part of our study was the analysis of triggering context
and how it helped to pinpoint the core experience in experience
reports. The identification of the triggering context is quite
straightforward, as there is usually only one clearly influential
contextual factor that relates to the core experience. There are
usually several contextual factors in the context categories (such
as in the examples in Tables 3 and 4), but in most of the cases, a
single factor leads to a major change in the reported experience.
This change becomes the most memorable and meaningful
experience in the report.
Previous studies have emphasized the significance of physical and
social contexts for the user experience of mobile systems, as they
are the most frequently studied [30]. However, the findings from
our study suggest that the influence of the Task and Device
contexts should not be underestimated at the cost of other context
categories. The Device context acted as a triggering context in
29% of the reports, and the Task and Social contexts were
triggering contexts in 23% and 20% of the reports, respectively.
The Service, Environment, Spatio-Temporal, and Personal
contexts were considerably less often identified as a triggering
context. As one might assume, the Environment and Spatio-
Temporal contexts are usually considered to be important factors
to be taken into account, but based on our findings, the Device
and Task contexts are more relevant to consider even with mobile
products.
One of the most interesting results from our study is that the
Personal context can also act as a triggering context for
experiences. The Personal context was found to be the triggering
context in five experience reports. In those stories, the experience
was elicited by the users’ physical condition, which the user
observed through a mobile device (e.g. heart rate monitor). This
result further emphasizes the importance of the triggering context
analysis in the user experience studies, because the triggering
context does not have to be some external factor, but it can stem
from the user’s own physiological or mental state.
In this study, we used the Playful Experience (PLEX)
categorization [2] for articulating the core experiences. However,
triggering context analysis is not bound to PLEX categorization,
and it is also possible to use other experience categorizations for
articulating core experiences (e.g. [17]).
The presented work in this paper opens interesting directions for
future work. One direction is to determine if there are regularities
between triggering contexts and core experiences. Especially, it
would be interesting to explore whether certain triggering
contexts tend to elicit certain kinds of experiences, and whether
these experiences are negative or positive in general. In our study,
Access Network was present in many experience reports as part of
contextual factors which affect user experience, but it was never
regarded as a triggering context for a core experience. It is
possible that participants did not realize that the Access Network
context would play a major role in the formation of meaningful
experience, and therefore, it was not emphasized in the reports.
Another similar kind of observation from the results was that the
Spatio-Temporal and Personal context categories are not very
often reported by the users. It is possible that these two context
categories are quite difficult for users to observe, and a user may
not usually be aware that their physiological state or time and
space have an effect on how they experience the product.
7. CONCLUSION
Understanding the context is essential for determining the user
experience of mobile products. Previous research has discussed
mobile context as a single entity with unspecified dimensions. We
have presented a categorization that defines eight context
categories: Environment, Personal, Task, Social, Spatio-
Temporal, Device, Service, and Access Network. We have used
this categorization to analyze how the different contextual factors
appear in users’ stories of using personal mobile products as
described in experience reports. Furthermore, the contextual
factor identification has allowed us to pinpoint the triggering
context and the core experience in a report. Core experiences are
meaningful experiences which the participants have emphasized
when communicating their experience of using a product. We
have articulated the core experiences by using the Playful
Experience framework, which defines a set of 22 experience
categories.
Our study increases the understanding of the dynamic nature of
user experience and provides a means for researchers and
designers to explore how different contextual factors are
connected to certain experiences. This is essential e.g. for making
product evaluations more accurate. The context categorization we
developed on basis of Guarneri et al. [15] allows us to identify
and separately examine the factors that form the context for
mobile product use. User experience descriptions, such as those
provided through experience reports, may portray several
experiences in a single report. By using triggering context
analysis, it is possible to find out the core experience that the user
considers most meaningful in each reported episode of product
use. The triggering context analysis may also help to predict how
changes in certain contextual factors influence the user
experience. Thus, triggering context analysis can guide product
design. Therefore, we propose that triggering context analysis
should be part of user experience studies of mobile products.
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