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.