Is there any impact of human influence factors on quality of experience?
The increasing popularity of real-time communication services has driven a rising interest in understanding the factors influencing the quality of experience (QoE). Many research activities aiming to accomplish this goal have addressed different influence factors (IFs), which may be classified into three categories, i.e., human IFs, context IFs, and system IFs. Although the importance of human IFs (HIFs) has been already emphasized, these factors have been considered to a limited extent, and due to lack of empirical evidence, they still remain not well understood. Therefore, this research has been motivated by the challenge to provide a deeper understanding of HIF's impact on QoE in the context of the real-time communication services. In order to accomplish this and verify the conclusions derived from related work, we have conducted two experimental studies which consider voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and unified communication (UC) services. Experimental results show no existence of impacts of selected HIFs on the user's overall QoE while using either VoIP or UC services. However, this highlights the need for further research on this topic due its importance for satisfying end user needs and expectations in the context of real-time communication services.