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Impact of Contextual Factors on Smartphone Applications Use

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Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services (MobiQuitous 2013)

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Further details at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onUserInteraction()

  2. 2.

    Available at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

  3. 3.

    Available at http://community.pentaho.com/

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. PMCC – IM – UFBA, Av. Adhemar de Barros, S/N, Salvador, Brazil

    Artur H. Kronbauer

  2. UNIFACS, R. Vieira Lopes N.2, Salvador, BA, Brazil

    Artur H. Kronbauer

  3. DI – CT – UFES, Av. Fernando Ferrari S/N, CT VIII, Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Celso A. S. Santos

Authors
  1. Artur H. Kronbauer
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  2. Celso A. S. Santos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Artur H. Kronbauer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Ivan Stojmenovic

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering,The University of Aizu Tsuruga, Fukushima, Japan

    Zixue Cheng

  3. School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Aizu Tsuruga, Fukushima, Japan

    Song Guo

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© 2014 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Kronbauer, A.H., Santos, C.A.S. (2014). Impact of Contextual Factors on Smartphone Applications Use. In: Stojmenovic, I., Cheng, Z., Guo, S. (eds) Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services. MobiQuitous 2013. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 131. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11569-6_52

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11569-6_52

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11568-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11569-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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