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Upright or sideways?: analysis of smartphone postures in the wild

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how smartphone applications, in particular web browsers, are used on mobile phones. Using a publicly available widget for smart phones, we recorded app usage and the phones' acceleration and orientation from 1,330 devices. Combining app usage and sensor data we derive the device's typical posture while different apps are used. Analyzing motion data shows that devices are moved more while messaging and navigation apps are used as opposed to browser and other common applications. The time distribution between landscape and portrait depicts that most of the landscape mode time is used for burst interaction (e.g., text entry), except for Media apps, which are mostly used in landscape mode. Additionally, we found that over 31% of our users use more than one web browser. Our analysis reveals that the duration of mobile browser sessions is longer by a factor of 1.5 when browsers are explicitly started through the system's launcher in comparison to being launched from within another app. Further, users switch back and forth between apps and web browsers, which suggest that a tight and smooth integration of web browsers with native apps can improve the overall usability. From our findings we derive design guidelines for app developers.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobileHCI '13: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services
    August 2013
    662 pages
    ISBN:9781450322737
    DOI:10.1145/2493190
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 August 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. accelerometer
    2. device motion
    3. mobile phone
    4. orientation
    5. posture
    6. session
    7. surfing
    8. web browser
    9. www

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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    • (2023)A Web-Based Audio Computer-Assisted Self-interview Application With Illustrated Pictures to Administer a Hepatitis B Survey Among a Myanmar-Born Community in Perth, Australia: Development and User Acceptance StudyJMIR Formative Research10.2196/373587(e37358)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Smartphone-derived Virtual Keyboard Dynamics Coupled with Accelerometer Data as a Window into Understanding Brain HealthProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580906(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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