Paper Reading #3: Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones

Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones

CHI 2012, May 5-10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA

Session: Me & My Mobile

Authors (all from Rice University)

• Department of Psychology
• Chad C. Tossell
• A PhD student under Philip Kortum
• Philip Kortum
• A professor at Rice University
• Philip mainly focuses on device usability in the computer and electrical engineering world with a background in mobile and web devices.
• Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Ahmad Rahmati
• A PhD student for Computer Engineering who works with Dr. Zhong.
• Clayton Shepard
• A third year PhD student from New Mexico who loves a good beer on his off time (I think Clayton and I would get along well).
• He specializes in mobile systems (another reason I think we would get along well!).
• Lin Zhong
• The leader of the Efficient Computing Group at Rice University which leads research of making computers and web-based interfaces efficient and usable.

Summary

This research group sought after information regarding web usage on smartphones for the average person.  They recruited 24 people who promised to use the iPhone given to them as their only smartphone for a whole year.  This iPhone logged all internet usage from browser-based access, to email, to native applications downloaded from the Apple AppStore including amount of time spent on sessions and location where the session was accessed.  Upon the returning of the smartphones, they found interesting data that complemented previous data from PC usage.  They noted that much of the internet usage on the iPhone was short and direct (very little 'browsing' in the literal sense).  This is complementary to the PC because much PC internet use is for browsing or spending large amounts of time.  The iPhone was used much more often than a PC but for smaller chunks of time.  They also noted a difference between browser use and NIA (native internet application).

Removed (native applications)		Kept (native internet applications)
SMS	Voice Phone	Email	Maps
Non-Web Games	Camera	Facebook	Weather
Settings	iPod	Web Games	News
Table 1: Some NIAs and categories of NIAs analyzed along with several that were removed.

When analyzing the NIA data, they were able to divide the users into two major sub-groups.  The first group they labeled "Pioneers" as the people who seemed to use their web browser for all of their web access.  For example, instead of using the Mail application, they would use their email's web-service in the Safari browser to read and write emails.  The second group was labeled as "Natives" who used NIAs much more often than their browser, unless they were searching Google for something.  They made a several other less significant claims regarding the study.

Figure 1 (Tossell et al)

On an interesting note, Figure 1 shows a graph of use over time of the browser versus the NIA suggesting that initially the browser was used until NIAs were found for the tasks which the user needed to perform.

Related Work

1. Informal learning with PDAs and smartphones
2. User Experience Analysis of Smartphone Web Surfing in UMTS Networks
3. Exploring Cross-Device Web Use on PCs and Mobile Devices
4. Universities and Libraries Move to the Mobile Web.
5. The future of the mobile web
6. Smartphones vs. laptops: comparing web browsing behavior and the implications for caching
7. Web services on embedded devices
8. Tales of 34 iPhone Users: How they change and why they are different
9. Mobile application development: web vs. native
10. Web services on mobile devices-implementation and experience

There was a large amount of related work to this topic, but nothing done on such a specific topic as how people use their iPhones.  There has been a lot of talk about the difference between PC work and mobile device browsing, but not much discussion over the different ways users accessed the web.

Evaluation

The authors used plenty of quantitative and objective data to make their claims, but some subjectivity was exercised in the gathering of that data.  After a year of collecting data over what websites were accessed, where they were accessed from, and how they were accessed (as well as how much time was spent on the internet) it would be hard for them to make any of that data subjective or qualitative.  All of the data collected was qualitative except the actual web addresses they were collecting and sorting into different categories.

Discussion

I enjoyed reading about this research as it interests me how the world of the web is evolving and being used differently by different people.  I think it is fairly novel for the types of claims they were able to make with the data and I fully support their suggested functionalities for future smartphones to accomodate different users.