Abstract User experience has become a popular term in research and industry. There has been a great attempt to study and design user experiences. This thesis gives a practical view to user experience studies and methods by reporting test settings and results of the ADAMOS case studies. The goal of the ADAMOS project was to investigate context- and action-sensitive services in terms of how users experience when the system can detect one’s location and actions, and then adjust according to this information. The aim of this thesis is to investigate problems and issues in studying user experiences of mobile services and to find out in which conditions the study of user experience is possible and meaningful. As a contribution this thesis provides practical information for conducting user experience studies and evaluating experiences. The first contribution is a framework (U2E-Frame), which I created and improved iteratively in each test case. The framework is method-independent and it can be used for planning and conducting tests. The second contribution of the thesis is the practical view to all methods that are created, applied, presented and evaluated in this thesis. Especially during this thesis work three novel methods (Mobile Feedback, 3E-Diary and SUE methodology) have been developed and evaluated. The evaluation of the research methods illustrates that the best practice to study user experience is to use several methods together. This enables deeper understanding of user experiences. As the third contribution of this thesis I introduce a proposal of ten user experience heuristics for design and evaluation of user experiences. The aim of these heuristics is to enable designers to understand what meaning user experience has in product design. Developers can use these heuristics for designing and evaluating user experience aspects in product design. This thesis presents the main challenges in user experience research: know what to study (comprehensive user experience), know how to study it (find appropriate methods) and know how to evaluate and design it (user experience heuristics). An answer to the research problem is that it is both possible and meaningful to study user experience when we know user experience targets, and features of the services we want to investigate, and we can use the most appropriate methods, ensure the participant’s commitment to the test and ensure analysing relationships between results collected with different methods.

With the advent of powerful multimedia capable mobile phones, the market for mobile services is flourishing. Zenterio AB's Halfpipe Active Desktop is a complete distributed mobile service platform a with a powerful server and platform-independent client. The communication between the client and server takes place over a GPRS-capable mobile network. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a secure communications protocol for use between the Halfpipe Active Desktop client and server. This is done by determining requirements, analyzing candidate protocols and then by designing the final protocol. The result, the Halfpipe Active Channel protocol, is an authorized, encrypted, session oriented, message based and light weight protocol designed to minimize computational as well as network overhead. This master's thesis project was defined by and performed at Zenterio AB during the second half of 2004.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the mobile virtual operator market in the Czech Republic, regarding its development compared to abroad, and to identify the opportunities and threats in the Czech market. The first chapture describes the global development and future trends. The second chapter characterizes the development of Czech market of mobile services and important events preceding the entry of virtual operators. The third chapter focuses on analysis of Czech market compared to British, the mobile virtual operators are segmented and evaluated based on the potential for future success in the market. The opportunities and threats are identified through own qualitative research using the technique of focus group.

Nas ciências de computação, o estudo de emoções tem sido impulsionado pela construção de ambientes interativos, especialmente no contexto dos dispositivos móveis. Pesquisas envolvendo interação humano-robô têm explorado emoções para propiciar experiências naturais de interação com robôs sociais. Um dos aspectos a serem investigados é o das abordagens práticas que exploram mudanças na personalidade de um sistema artificial propiciadas por alterações em um estado emocional inferido do usuário. Neste trabalho, é proposto um ambiente para interação humano-robô baseado em emoções, reconhecidas por meio de análise de expressões faciais, para plataforma Android. Esse sistema consistiu em um agente virtual agregado a um aplicativo, o qual usou informação proveniente de um reconhecedor de emoções para adaptar sua estratégia de interação, alternando entre dois paradigmas discretos pré-definidos. Nos experimentos realizados, verificou-se que a abordagem proposta tende a produzir mais empatia do que uma condição controle, entretanto esse resultado foi observado somente em interações suficientemente longas. / In computer sciences, the development of interactive environments have motivated the study of emotions, especially on the context of mobile devices. Research in human-robot interaction have explored emotions to create natural experiences on interaction with social robots. A fertile aspect consist on practical approaches concerning changes on the personality of an artificial system caused by modifications on the users inferred emotional state. The present project proposes to develop, for Android platform, an environment for human-robot interaction based on emotions. A dedicated module will be responsible for recognizing emotions by analyzing facial expressions. This system consisted of a virtual agent aggregated to an application, which used information of the emotion recognizer to adapt its interaction strategy, alternating between two pre-defined discrete paradigms. In the experiments performed, it was found that the proposed approach tends to produce more empathy than a control condition, however this result was observed only in sufficiently long interactions.

L'accès à Internet par satellite permet de connecter des régions isolées de la terre ou des utilisateurs en mouvement, pour lesquels une solution terrestre peut s’avérer couteuse voire impossible. L’utilisation de constellations de satellite en orbite basse permet de transmettre avec des délais similaires à ceux des transmissions terrestres, permettant l’utilisation des protocoles de transport classiques comme TCP. L’utilisation d’un tel environnement engendre cependant des contraintes spécifiques à ce type de réseau, comme des délais de transmission variables et un important taux d’erreur, principalement lors de la traversée de l’atmosphère. Pour compenser ces forts taux de pertes, des mécanismes de fiabilisation doivent être introduit au niveau des couche basse. Ces mécanismes ont toutefois un impact négatif sur les performances des protocoles de transport, notamment TCP, limitant grandement le débit. Le but de cette thèse est de comprendre dans un premier temps les interactions entre les mécanismes de fiabilisation et les protocoles de transport, pour ensuite proposer des solutions permettant d’améliorer la qualité des transmissions. / LEO satellite constellations allow to connect isolated or mobile users to the Internet, when terrestrial solutions are too expensive or impossible to deploy. Using such constellations allow to connect these areas with transmission delays close to terrestrial delays, and then to use the classic transport protocols such as TCP. However, this environment brings new impairments such as variable delays and important error rate between the satellite and the ground receiver. To counteract this high error rate, reliability schemes are introduced on the link between the satellite and the ground user. However, these schemes have a negative impact on the transport protocol (TCP), mitigating the throughput, and which has not been deeply studied yet. In this thesis, we first understand the impact of the reliability schemes on the transport layer, and then propose solutions to improve the efficiency of the transmissions.

L’objectif de cette thèse empirique est de contribuer à une meilleure compréhension du marché de la téléphonie mobile en étudiant les stratégies d’offres (et notamment la tarification) des opérateurs, ainsi que les comportements des consommateurs en termes d’usages et de recommandation. / We wish to contribute to the understanding of the mobile market by studying the pricing strategies of the operators, but also by studying the consumers behavior in terms of uses and recommendation.

L’Homme est aujourd’hui au centre d’une sphère électronique composée de terminaux hétérogènes capables d’offrir des services similaires. Il choisit désormais l’interface adaptée à ses besoins, passant librement d’un terminal à un autre pour bénéficier d’un même service. Cette liberté induit de nouvelles problématiques de mobilité ayant un impact direct sur l’expérience utilisateur. L’état de l’art fait apparaître deux catégories de services aux caractéristiques propres : des services applicatifs revêtant diverses formes (applications locales et distantes) et des services de télécommunications reposant sur des infrastructures standardisées. L’étude des contraintes de mobilité et des approches existantes révèle que les solutions actuelles dans ce domaine sont incomplètes et ne peuvent assurer une continuité de bout en bout : désignation, transfert, adaptation, etc. Nous avons implémenté des mécanismes de continuité dans les environnements ims et web pour des services de télécommunications et multimédias afin de mettre en évidence les lacunes des solutions existantes, et identifier les fonctions élémentaires d’une gestion globale de la mobilité. Le résultat de ces travaux révèle qu’une approche plus abstraite du concept de service est nécessaire dans la définition d’un modèle générique de continuité adapté au milieu hétérogène de l’utilisateur. Nous avons introduit de nouveaux concepts et des mécanismes de mobilité originaux que nous avons ensuite implémentés dans un "distributed Service Manager". Enfin nous avons évalué ce modèle grâce à des tests qualitatifs et quantitatifs sur un prototype selon un scénario de transfert d’un service d’édition de texte dans un milieu hétérogène. Les résultats particulièrement satisfaisants prouvent la faisabilité de notre solution et son adéquation avec les contraintes de continuités temporelle et contextuelle / People now live within an electronic sphere of heterogenous devices providing similar services. From now on they can freely choose the best interface corresponding to their needs, switching from a device to another while enjoying a same service. This freedom leverage new mobility issues that directly impact the user experience. The state of the art introduces two services types with specific properties : applicative services commonly known as local or remote applications and telecommunication services based on standardised infrastructures. The study of the mobility constraints and the existing approaches shows that current solutions in this domain are incomplete and cannot assure an end-to-end continuity : selection, transfer, adaptation, etc. We implemented continuity mechanisms in the ims and web environments for telecommunication and multimedia services in order to emphasize the lacks of the existing solutions and identify the basic features of a unified mobility management model. These works led to a more abstract vision of the service concept, required to define a generic continuity model adapted to the user’s heterogeneous environment. We introduced innovative concepts and original mobility mechanisms, which we implemented in a "distributed Service Manager". Finally, we evaluated this model with qualitative and quantitative tests on a prototype according to a transfer scenario of text-edition service in a heterogeneous environment. Results are very satisfying, they prove the feasibility of our solution and its adequacy with the temporal and contextual constraints

Due to the increasing digitization of society, Gamification of services has become increasingly proliferated. Identifying and knowing how to manipulate the factors for successful implementation of gamification strategies is paramount. This study focuses on the factors of intrinsic motivation as identified by Self-Determination Theory while utilizing the principles of Service-Dominant Logic. Though the relationship between Self-Determination Theory and Gamification is relatively well researched, this is the first study to examine the relationship between all of these three distinct theories. This is a deductive quantitative study wherein upon an extensive theoretical and literature chapter, a collection of survey questions was devised and disseminated to appropriate audiences. This approach yielded 108 survey answers which were designed to examine independent versus dependent variables in order to draw a conclusion on specific relationships. The research findings revealed that the combination of Self-Determination Theory and Service-Dominant Logic did not yield any significant benefits when attempting to enhance customer motivation. Consequently, this study failed to provide evidence supporting the notion that these theories, when employed collectively within a gamification context, could produce more positive outcomes in comparison to Self-Determination Theory alone. The study yielded some interesting implications. Managers must exercise caution regarding the adverse effects that excessive customer autonomy can have. They should strive to establish a well-defined equilibrium between granting customers control while still meeting their expectations. Moreover, managers must tactfully avoid making customers feel inadequate which can be done through offering manageable challenges and tailoring products and services to suit their unique requirements. Lastly, managers should account for the preferences of their target audience when implementing gamification and allocate resources to research and development to remain informed about the latest advancements in this field.

[pt] A telefonia celular no Brasil representa um segmento de notável sucesso comercial nos últimos anos, apresentando um crescimento muito rápido e uma penetração que superou em muito as melhores expectativas das próprias operadoras. Parte importante deste sucesso é devido à adoção da telefonia celular pelas camadas de menor renda da população. Considerando este contexto, esta pesquisa tem como objetivo estudar os impactos da telefonia celular para este segmento, levantando as motivações para uso do serviço, os impactos no dia-a-dia dos usuários e o processo de aprendizado e uso dos serviços disponíveis. A pesquisa foi feita por intermédio de entrevistas em profundidade com usuários de baixa renda familiar per capita. Como resultado, notamos que a telefonia celular contribuiu para uma melhoria na qualidade de vida, pelas oportunidades de relacionamento social e inserção no mercado de trabalho. Por outro lado, nota-se uma oportunidade em potencializar o uso do telefone celular entre os usuários de baixa renda, simplificando seu uso e divulgando as vantagens dos serviços disponíveis. / [en] During the last years, mobile telecommunication has been a segment with remarkable commercial success in Brazil, presenting a fast user base growth and a market penetration that exceeded the best expectations from the own operators. A significant part of this success is due to the adoption of cell phone by lower income users. Considering this context, this research aims to study the impacts of mobile telecommunication for this specific segment, by depicting the motivations for its usage, the impacts on user´s daily life and how they learned and use available services. Based on extensive interviews with lower median family income users, the research indicates that the cell phone can help improve life quality, through social integration and greater work opportunities. On the other hand, we can note an opportunity to improve cell phone usage among lower income users, by simplifying and divulgating the benefits of existing services.

In this study the technology acceptance model (TAM) serves as the foundation to analyze the behavior of consumers with regards to their use of the smartphone and its associated services. The research also aims to provide a basis for companies that need a complete theoretical framework to better understand the behavior of consumers using smartphones and related services under the intensely competitive environment and constantly evolving changes in consumer demand. The extensive version of TAM will assist in analyzing consumer behavior and influences affecting the use of smartphones, which will be validated through the empirical data collected. This research utilizes one questionnaire to conduct investigations pertaining to the study. Questionnaires were distributed to consumers that use mobile services and/or applications. The majority of the questionnaires were filled out by students in college and graduate institutions in Taipei, Taiwan. In addition, a majority of the subjects who participated have already purchased smartphones. A total of 500 questionnaires were distributed and 266 were returned, making a 53.2 % return rate. Results retrieved from this study are as follows: 1. When a user experiences deeper social presence, higher subjective norms are created by the application. 2. When a user experiences deeper social presence, perceived usefulness of the application increases. 3. When a user experiences deeper social presence, perceived ease of use of the application fluctuates. 4. The higher the application’s subjective norms are, the more significant is the increase of the user’s image. 5. The higher the application’s subjective norms are, the more significant is the increase of perceived usefulness 6. As the user’s perceived ease of use of the application increases, the greater the influence becomes on perceived usefulness. 7. The higher the application’s subjective norm is, the more the user’s behavioral intention to use increases. 8. As the application’s perceived usefulness increases, the user’s behavioral intention to use the application also increases. 9. As the user’s perceived ease of use for the application increases, the greater the influence on behavioral intention to use becomes. Undoubtedly, companies need to understand consumer behavior and their use of the smartphones. Consequently, this study seeks to use theories from TAM as a basis and consider principles of external factors influencing a consumer-----social presence and society’s influences. The components of TAM, social presence and society’s influences are analyzed to compile this research.