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Pers Ubiquit Comput (2012) 16:105114 DOI 10.1007/s00779-011-0412-2
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Habits make smartphone use more pervasive
Antti Oulasvirta Tye Rattenbury
Lingyi Ma Eeva Raita
Received: 22 September 2010 / Accepted: 10 May 2011 / Published online: 16 June 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011
Abstract Examining several sources of data on smart-phone use, this paper presents evidence for the popular conjecture that mobile devices are habit-forming. The form of habits we identied is called a checking habit: brief, repetitive inspection of dynamic content quickly accessible on the device. We describe ndings on kinds and frequencies of checking behaviors in three studies. We found that checking habits occasionally spur users to do other things with the device and may increase usage overall. Data from a controlled eld experiment show that checking behaviors emerge and are reinforced by informational rewards that are very quickly accessible. Qualitative data suggest that although repetitive habitual use is frequent, it is experienced more as an annoyance than an addiction. We conclude that supporting habit-formation is an opportunity for making smartphones more personal and pervasive.
Keywords Smartphones Habits Logging data
Diary studies
1 Introduction
The impact of portable computing devices is undergoing a heated debate in the popular media.1 It is evident that users practices are changingthey socialize in new ways; they do tasks in new ways, often interleaving and cross-pollinating between activities; they share and gather information in new ways. A concern expressed repeatedly centers around the notion of habitthat is, how new technologies, like mobile phones in the 1990s and laptops and smartphones in the 2000s, spur unforeseen consequences the fabric of everyday life. While many appreciate the ubiquitous and continuous access to social networks, there are concerns about invasion into private domains [8], and it has been observed that gains achieved in productivity do not automatically generate free time but complicate worklife balance [9]. Indeed, sociologists have reported Westerners time-use becoming more irregular, fragmented, overlapped, and shifting to new places [13, 18].
Smartphoneshandheld personal computersrepresent the most recent step in the evolution of portable information and communication technology (see Fig. 1). Smart-phonesequipped with persistent network connectivity and supporting the installation of new applicationshave the potential to produce new habits related to Internet use. Their exact impact on the formation of new...