Barriers and bridges in the adoption of today's mobile phone contextual services

This paper presents ethnographic observations, a diary study and a large-scale quantitative questionnaire (n=395) designed to study the reasons for adoption and refusal of context-aware mobile applications. Through a qualitative study we identify 24 user needs that these applications fulfill and 9 barriers for adoption. We found that for many of the identified needs the end-goal is not that of receiving information , thus complementing work on mobile information needs. Also, this work offers an actionable list of obstacles that prevent contextual services to reach a larger audience. Finally, our findings suggest the opportunity to develop novel mobile applications that fulfill needs in the activity and personal contextual dimensions , and that of developing an application store for feature phones .