The future trend of internet usage increasingly emphasizes visual modes of engagement and user interactions across complex scenarios, including multimedia video, gaming, mapping services, and immersive applications. Consequently, the success of media creators, application developers, and service providers hinges on selecting appropriate tools and technologies to optimize the user experience. Quality of Experience (QoE) offers a framework for evaluating user experience and satisfaction with applications or services by using both objective and subjective metrics. It is important to recognize that various factors can influence user feedback, including different traits of human personality, interactions with systems, and the context in which they are used.

In this thesis, we adopt a holistic approach to evaluate the QoE for video quality and outdoor applications, focusing on system, human, and contextual influence factors. From a system perspective, we investigate the performance of widely implemented video codecs and propose more effective objective QoE metrics. The objective results are benchmarked against subjective outcomes to underscore their limitations in quantifying user experience, which is influenced by numerous factors beyond system-related aspects. Regarding human influence factors, our analysis encompasses user delight with the content presented, mood, gender, and the impact of eye-tracking on user assessments. A key observation is the critical importance of selecting stimuli that effectively engage users to accurately capture the true impact of user delight in the context of mobile gaming. For contextual factors, we examine the frequency of use and highlight the distinction between assumptions and actual experiences during user evaluations of outdoor activities. Our findings reveal the notable effects of these influence factors, particularly user delight, which demonstrated significant outcomes. The impact of visual attention on user behavior and subsequent ratings was also established. Furthermore, we identify limitations in existing QoE metrics and underscore the need for more cohesive QoE models that effectively engage users with mobility-driven applications or services that are not confined to multimedia streaming. These insights are drawn from several use cases reflecting the evolving ways in which users are interacting with systems nowadays. Our findings highlight the need for future QoE methodologies to evolve, by integrating the complex interplay of technical and human-centric variables. This evolution is essential to develop flexible, dynamic, and scalable solutions that cater to the demands of diverse applications.