Contextual experience sampling of mobile application micro-usage

Abstract

Research suggests smartphone users face "application overload", but literature lacks an in-depth investigation of how users manage their time on smartphones. In a 3-week study we collected smartphone application usage patterns from 21 participants to study how they manage their time interacting with the device. We identified events we term application micro-usage: brief bursts of interaction with applications. While this practice has been reported before, it has not been investigated in terms of the context in which it occurs (e.g., location, time, trigger and social context). In a 2-week follow-up study with 15 participants, we captured participants' context while micro-using, with a mobile experience sampling method (ESM) and weekly interviews.Our results show that about approximately 40% of application launches last less than 15 seconds and happen most frequently when the user is at home and alone. We further discuss the context, taxonomy and implications of application micro-usage in our field. We conclude with a brief reflection on the relevance of short-term interaction observations for other domains beyond mobile phones.

Quantifying Sources and Types of Smartwatch Usage Sessions

“…These results suggest that the habit of quick unprompted peeks (and micro-usage [9]) seems to carry from smartphones to smartwatches, and longer unprompted interaction sessions are less frequent. For smartphones, Banovic et al [2] classify a median of 46.6% smartphone usage sessions as a glance session, which is their shortest classification on usage duration.…”

“…Ferreira et al [9] introduced the term application microusage, describing the brief bursts of application interaction: "approximately 40% of application launches last less than 15 seconds and happen most frequently when the user is at home and alone" [9]. Smartphone usage is typically short, with Yan et al [41] finding that 50% of mobile phone engagement lasts less than 30 seconds.…”

A Large-Scale Study of iPhone App Launch Behaviour

“…Ferreira et al [17] performed a study focussing on the more specific measure of app micro-usage, defined as a short interaction session with a mobile application. Clustering app usages by duration, they found a 'natural break' in usage at 15 seconds, with 41.5% of app uses being a shorter duration and thus deemed to be micro-usages.…”

“…Consequently, there have been many recent studies of app launch data and general usage on Android-e.g. [5,9,12,17,25,29,40,42,46], several of which we discuss later-but no large-scale study of iOS.…”

“…In this paper, we present a reproduction study with a set of over 10,000 jailbroken iPhone users, reproducing analyses from a selection of papers [9,13,17,46] that examine use of Android. From studies covering high-level usage statistics to more specialised analysis of user differentiation, we aim to identify where our results show similar patterns to past work on Android, and where they differ.…”