Abstract
The rapid growth of mobile devices has made it challenging for users to maintain a consistent digital history among all their personal devices. Even with a variety of cloud computing solutions, users continue to redo web searches and reaccess web content that they already interacted with on another device. This paper presents insights into the cross-device reaccess habits of 15 smartphone users. We studied how they reaccessed content between their computer and smartphone through a combination of data logging, a screenshot-based diary study, and user interviews. From 1276 cross-device reaccess events we found that users reaccess content between their phone and computer with comparable frequency, and that users rarely planned ahead for their reaccess needs. Based on our findings, we present opportunities for building future mobile systems to support the unplanned activities and content reaccess needs of mobile users.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
BBC. The top 100 websites of the Internet, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8562801.stm
Chrome-to-phone, http://code.google.com/p/chrometophone/
Dropbox, http://dropbox.com
Evernote, http://evernote.com
Firefox Home, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/
Adar, E., Teevan, J., Dumais, S.T.: Large scale analysis of web revisitation patterns. In: CHI 2008: Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1197–1206. ACM, New York (2008)
Beitzel, S.M., Jensen, E.C., Chowdhury, A., Grossman, D., Frieder, O.: Hourly analysis of a very large topically categorized web query log. In: SIGIR 2004: Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 321–328. ACM, New York (2004)
Brandt, J., Weiss, N., Klemmer, S.R.: txt 4 l8r: lowering the burden for diary studies under mobile conditions. In: CHI 2007: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2303–2308. ACM, New York (2007)
Carter, S., Mankoff, J.: When participants do the capturing: the role of media in diary studies. In: CHI 2005: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 899–908. ACM, New York (2005)
Church, K., Smyth, B.: Understanding mobile information needs. In: MobileHCI 2008: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pp. 493–494. ACM, New York (2008)
Cockburn, A., Mckenzie, B.: What do web users do? an empirical analysis of web use. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 54(6), 903–922 (2001)
Dearman, D., Kellar, M., Truong, K.N.: An examination of daily information needs and sharing opportunities. In: CSCW 2008: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 679–688. ACM, New York (2008)
Dearman, D., Pierce, J.S.: It’s on my other computer!: computing with multiple devices. In: CHI 2008: Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 767–776. ACM, New York (2008)
González, I.E., Hong, J.: Gurungo: coupling personal computers and mobile devices through mobile data types. In: HotMobile 2010: Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications, pp. 66–71. ACM, New York (2010)
Harding, M., Storz, O., Davies, N., Friday, A.: Planning ahead: techniques for simplifying mobile service use. In: HotMobile 2009: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 1–6. ACM, New York (2009)
Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., Bateman, J., Saracevic, T.: Real life information retrieval: a study of user queries on the web. SIGIR Forum 32(1), 5–17 (1998)
Kamvar, M., Baluja, S.: A large scale study of wireless search behavior: Google mobile search. In: CHI 2006: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 701–709. ACM, New York (2006)
Kamvar, M., Kellar, M., Patel, R., Xu, Y.: Computers and iphones and mobile phones, oh my!: a logs-based comparison of search users on different devices. In: WWW 2009: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 801–810. ACM, New York (2009)
Kane, S.K., Karlson, A.K., Meyers, B.R., Johns, P., Jacobs, A., Smith, G.: Exploring cross-device web use on pCs and mobile devices. In: Gross, T., Gulliksen, J., Kotzé, P., Oestreicher, L., Palanque, P., Prates, R.O., Winckler, M. (eds.) INTERACT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5726, pp. 722–735. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Karlson, A.K., Iqbal, S.T., Meyers, B., Ramos, G., Lee, K., Tang, J.C.: Mobile taskflow in context: a screenshot study of smartphone usage. In: CHI 2010: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2009–2018. ACM, New York (2010)
Nylander, S., Lundquist, T., Brännström, A., Karlson, B.: “It’s just easier with the phone” – A diary study of internet access from cell phones. In: Tokuda, H., Beigl, M., Friday, A., Brush, A.J.B., Tobe, Y. (eds.) Pervasive 2009. LNCS, vol. 5538, pp. 354–371. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Obendorf, H., Weinreich, H., Herder, E., Mayer, M.: Web page revisitation revisited: implications of a long-term click-stream study of browser usage. In: CHI 2007: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 597–606. ACM, New York (2007)
Pierce, J.S., Nichols, J.: An infrastructure for extending applications’ user experiences across multiple personal devices. In: UIST 2008: Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 101–110. ACM, New York (2008)
Sohn, T., Li, K.A., Griswold, W.G., Hollan, J.D.: A diary study of mobile information needs. In: CHI 2008: Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 433–442. ACM, New York (2008)
Spink, A., Jansen, B.J., Wolfram, D., Saracevic, T.: From e-sex to e-commerce: Web search changes. Computer 35(3), 107–109 (2002)
Tauscher, L., Greenberg, S.: How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 47(1), 97–137 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bales, E., Sohn, T., Setlur, V. (2011). Planning, Apps, and the High-End Smartphone: Exploring the Landscape of Modern Cross-Device Reaccess. In: Lyons, K., Hightower, J., Huang, E.M. (eds) Pervasive Computing. Pervasive 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6696. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21726-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21726-5_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21725-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21726-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)