Influence of human factors and affective technology in utilitarian
mobile applications

Erkki Kurkinen


Mobile devices, systems and applications constitute a fundamental
part in the communications operations of the utilitarian users,
such as police forces, fire departments, border guards, ambulance
services and voluntary organizations, using the modern mobile
technology. Traditionally those users have been considered as
users who mobile devices (phone, multimedia device, laptop, etc.)
is only a tool which is used only at working hours to accomplish
their duties.

Modern radio communication devices with a versatile selection of
applications and accessories have made it possible to transfer
from voice-only communications to more diverse communication mode
which can be called multimedia communications. This type of
communication is very well known and favorite in the consumer
market. This type of communication contains not only the voice
communication, but text, multimedia and social media type
communication elements s as well. The fundamental and growing part
of the communication systems of the public organizations are
comprised of mobile applications, which are available for the
users also when they on move, not tied to their office desks. Good
examples of this type of application are location based map
applications, GPS-devices, applications for different type of data
base queries and standard mobile office applications allowing
users to use their own information systems when on move. In the
future the numbers of this type of applications will be growing.
Hence, the interest towards the user satisfaction and user
experience will be growing as well.

Traditionally the behavior of the utilitarian users has been
studied using the specific methods developed for those users.
Similarly, the hedonic users, using the devices mostly or only for
entertainment purposes have their own methods. Both method types
have been researched separately from each other.

In this study the main goal is to find and create models for
predicting the user intensions to use and accept mobile
applications in utilitarian domain. Those methods will have
elements from both utilitarian and hedonic research methods. One
of the hypotheses of this research is that the behavior of the
utilitarian and hedonic users is postulated to get closer from
user experience point of view.

The results of this study will firstly, add the understanding of
the intensions to use and accept certain technology into use,
secondly, will decrease the risks of customer acceptance in R&D
work of the application and systems development and thirdly, will
give more tools to utilitarian customers to evaluate and minimize
their own acceptance risks when introducing new IT and mobile
systems for their users. Additionally, the results of this study
heavily support of the current tendency towards the design
thinking -type of development work if the systems.