Flow, mobile app usage situations, and user mindfulness

Regardless of prevalent consumption of mobile applications (hereafter apps) and their ubiquitous use in daily life, the current literature provides limited knowledge on how user’s experience during consumption of apps is shaped in various usage situations across multiple app usage occasions. To advance our knowledge about user experience in apps, this study advances an argument that flow experience is the function of user’s emotions and cognition with apps in conjunction with individual’s personality trait and usage situations. To address
this issue, the real-time data was collected from 1600 app users across three waves of surveys through an event-contingent experience sampling method (ESM). The results show that both user’s trait mindfulness and app usage situation moderate the relationship between cognition and emotions towards app and user’s flow state. The findings enrich the existing literature on flow experience in mobile context and provide theoretical and practical implications.