Paper Reading #4: Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones

Intro:

• Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones
• Chad C. Tossell, Philip Kortum, Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, and Lin Zhong. (2012).  Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), 2769-2778.
• Author Biographies:
• Philip Kortum has spent over 15 years working with human-computer interaction in the telecommunications and defense industries. His Bachelors is in Industrial Engineering, his masters of science is in Industrial Engineering with a focus on Human Factors, and his PhD was in Biomedical Engineering at Univsersity of Texas. He is now a professor in the department of psycholoy at Rice.
• Ahmad Rahmati received his Bachelors and PhD in Computer Engineering from University of Technology in Tehran and Rice University, respectively. His research interest is in mobile, embedded, and wireless system design. His past work experience was at research labs at AT&T and Motorola. He also has three patents.
• Clayton Shepard is currently in his third year of his PhD at Rice. He received his Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering from Rice. He is specifically interested in mobile systems and a member of The Rice Efficient Computing Group.
• Lin Zhong is from China and received his Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 2005. He went to teach at Rice shortly thereafter.
• Chad C. Tossell is a current graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Rice University.

Summary:
The purpose of this research is to monitor and track usage of internet access over smartphones, and in specific, iPhones. The researchers discovered interesting facts along the way, including there were infrequent webpage revisits, little bookmark usage, users differed systematically from non-smartphone users.

Throughout the paper, the researchers noted some startling differences among smartphone usage and PCs. Such examples include the fact that not only web pages were designed for smartphones, the smaller screen size of smartphones, the delay associated with smartphones, and accessibility of smart phones.

The researchers spend most of the paper analyzing the results. They did consider application usage in association with the web. For reference, they note that NIA's refer to native internet applications which access the web, such as Facebook, weather, and maps.

Inherently, the vase majority of the results including the following discoveries for smartphones:

• Queries involved Google and averaged less than four words
• Low total number of queries because of slow download time and low navigation time
• Page re-visitation was relatively low and resembled figures similar to the PC 15 years ago
• Less frequent browser access and browser times
• Users accessed Google, blogs, Rice homepage, and Wikipedia in order of frequencies
• Most site re-visits were associated with a log-in page
• The comparison of NIAs can best be visualized below

• Further, NIAs were visited more often than websites
• The number of new NIAs were severely lower than websites (probably due to Facebook access)
• Location re-visitation was at 90% compared to the web based re-visit of roughly 20% (due to Google Maps)

Related work not referenced in the paper:
1) "Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones" by Jung, Enck, and Gilbert
2) "Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science" by Dafau, Duñabeitia, Moret-Tatay, McGonigal, Peeters, Alario, Balota, Brysbaert, Carreiras, Ferrand, Ktori, Perea, Rastle, Sasburg, Yap, Ziegler, Grainger
3) "The User Experience of Smart Phones: A Consumption Values Approach" by Bødker, Gimpel, and Hedman
4) "Mobile Smartphone use in Higher Education" by Yu
5) "Educational Aspects of Undergraduate Research on Smartphone Application Development" by Gibson, Taylor, Seymour, Smith, and Fries
6) "Getting Real: A Naturalistic Methodology for Using Smartphones to Collect Mediated Communications" by Tossell, Kortum, Shepared, Rahmati and Zhong.
7) "E-health and Nursing: Using Smartphones to Enhance Nursing Practice" by Wyatt and Krauskopf
8) "Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution" by Chun and Maniatis
9) "Soundcomber: A Stealthy and Context-Aware Sound Trojan for Smartphones" by Schlegel, Zhang, Zhou, Intwala, Kapadia, and Wang
10) "Denial of Convenience Attack to Smartphones Using a Fake WiFi Access Point" by Dondyk

The related work discussed in this section included several novel and interesting ideas, such as using a fake WiFi to attack smartphones. However, many of these related works were rather dissimilar to Characterizing Web Use on Smartphones. The actual research conducted in this report focuses on data evaluation, where as the vast majority of related work concentrate on a new and eccentric idea related to both smartphones and web access. Thus, the similarity of research return dwindled reports, but the learning of new research in this relatively large domain proved to be of interest.

Evaluation:
The researchers conducted an extremely thorough study on the subject of smartphone web access. They collected bountiful data across multiple domains. The first portion of the paper involved quantitative data as described in the summary. Although this data is disputable facts, the only potential downfall of this research was the lack of number of iPhone users tracked, which was twenty four.

On a tangent, the researchers also measured user's experience on a subjective manner. They surveyed the users and asked about the comparison of smartphones versus PCs. This provided insight into how the users actually felt about smartphone web access instead of analyze hoards of raw data numbers. Thus, the paper provided a well rounded evaluation of all results accumulated during the year of data collecting.

Discussion:
The paper published does not necessarily provide any novel new kind of technology. But, it does offer insight into future developmental aspects of smartphone integration. For instance, the researchers do consider different smartphones, other than the iPhone, despite the fact that only an iPhone was used in the experiment. Also, the most promising part of the paper involves the researchers opening up new possibilities to accommodate users web experience on their smartphone. Thus, the analysis provided here was sufficient.

On the other hand, I found the paper an interesting read. However, I did not discover any eye opening results through the research. Most of the conclusions drawn could have been predicted by intuition. In conclusion, I would prefer more of an experimental approach to this subject with small tweaks in how users access web pages on their smartphones rather than merely a collection of data.