Studying the effect of perceived hedonic mobile device quality on user experience evaluations of mobile applications

Abstract

When people interact with digital artefacts they perceive their pragmatic and hedonic qualities. In the case of interacting with mobile devices and applications, users seek utility as they try to satisfy certain needs, but at the same time they have certain feelings and emotions when, for example, they feel attached to their personal phone and/or trust its brand. Due to this strong relation between users and mobile devices a significant problem occurs when researchers want to evaluate the user experience of a mobile application in laboratory settings: the selection of an appropriate mobile device. Towards this end, this paper aims to unveil the effect of perceived hedonic quality of a mobile device on the user experience evaluation results of an application. Our results show that the perceived hedonic quality of a mobile device significantly affected the perceived pragmatic quality of the application, but not the hedonic one.

Keywords:

• mobile devices
• mobile applications
• user experience
• laboratory settings
• hedonic quality
• pragmatic quality
• attractiveness
• brand

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants and F. Rondiri, N. Rontogiannis, and A. Stoica for their effort to develop the test application.

Funding

The research behind this paper was partly financed by the Danish Research Councils [grant number 09-065143].