Wanted! How Elements from the Usage Context Affect Consumers' Value-in-Use Experience and Engagement with Mobile Services

The mobile services market is competitive. Service designers need to understand what drives users’ value-in-use experience and engagement. Recently, the impact of the usage context in co-determining the value-in-use co-creation potential was highlighted. Here, this role is empirically investigated. Hypotheses about the effects of three relevant usage context elements of mobile service apps: perceived task complexity, perceived unfamiliarity of location, and perceived time pressure via conditional value were investigated in an experiment. Results show that the experience of value-in-use, and ensuing customer engagement to a service are contingent on conditional value, in turn influenced by two of the investigated elements of the context and their interaction effect. Findings allow service designers to improve their services by adapting the services to the context, e.g., by prioritizing certain functions. Much variance in conditional value remains unexplained. More research is needed into the antecedents of conditional value. A research agenda is provided