Deciphering the Role of Context in Shaping Mobile Phone Usage: Design Recommendations for Context-aware Mobile Services from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Context-aware mobile services have become prevalent in the last few years due to advances in embedded sensors, emerging context-aware middleware and broadening application domains. However, it remains unclear how well mobile phones deal with challenges accompanying wider socio-cultural contexts when novel context-aware applications are utilized. We report on an exploratory small-scale study that gathers data from logging mobile application usage and follow-up retrospective interviews with 32 users of Android-powered mobile phones in both Chinese and Danish cultural contexts. Results of our logging study reveal that there are commonalities and differences in smartphone usage patterns across both Chinese and Danish contexts. Specifically, we found mobile application usage to be context dependent in that socio-cultural context co-shapes the usage of smartphone in both countries. We discuss the implications of our findings for designing and implementing context-aware mobile services.