Hi everyone. I'm Irene.
Today I'm going to present our work,
Understanding multi-device usage patterns:
physical device configurations, and fragmented workflows.
People have many devices.
If you look around yourself right now,
you're probably have at least
two devices or even more within your reach.
Such trend towards personal multi-device ecologies was
accelerated by the transition to
remote work during the recent pandemic.
When people added work devices to
their home devices and adapted
their home to function as ad-hoc workspace.
This trend also seem to stay even
two years later as
people adopted a more hybrid to working style.
So how did people use
multiple devices when transition to work from home?
And at the same time,
dealing was home at work?
To answer this research question,
we conducted a qualitative survey study
during the summer of 2020.
We collect the photos of people's common
physical setups and device arrangements at home,
and textual description on task
and activities people perform
using multiple devices.
In total we collected over 100 photos and
almost 900 text entries from
97 participants with diverse professional backgrounds.
So our findings can be divided into two parts.
First, about participants'
multi-device setup and the physical configurations.
And second about
participants common multi-device usage patterns
and their user values behind.
I will first highlight
some findings on participants'
multi-device physical setup.
So we break down
multi-device physical configurations into three aspects.
Device ecologies,
device arrangement and orientation, and workspace.
I will highlight some findings from
each of the three aspects.
So we found that our participants
have really diverse device ecologies.
As the diagram shows here,
we can see a diverse range,
in number of devices
our participants used in their workspace.
And besides that diverse number of devices,
we found people have
diverse device form factors in their setup as well.
In the two examples here,
although both workspaces have similar number of devices,
the type of devices in
their workspace are really different.
The left one mainly consists of laptops,
while the right one mainly has monitors.
When looking into participants'
device arrangement and orientations.
We found
although many workspace have fixed device setup,
like dual-monitor on a desk,
over half of our participants like to
integrate a mobile device into their workspace.
By putting them on stands or mounts.
For example, tablets are often placed
on the stands and titled for better viewing angles.
Mobile phone is often placed on the stand
as part of the workspace setup as well.
We also found that the majority of
our participants have multiple workspaces setup at home.
For example, working from the sofa in the living room,
as well as working from the desk in the office space.
And besides, our participants
often move between different workspaces
throughout their day as well.
As one participant described.
"We use devices wherever we are during the day,
in kitchen for breakfast to see news... on deck
during lunch, on sofa in evening
for relax and streaming movies.
Next, I will highlight some findings
on multi-device usage patterns,
and user values.
We identify five multi-device usage patterns
based on the task performed.
Whether the task are related or unrelated to each other.
And in what order are task performed,
either performed simultaneously or sequentially
The five device usage patterns,
we identified are partition,
integrate, clone, expand, and migrate.
Some of this usage patterns echoes
multi-device usages found by previous literature.
In this talk, I'll briefly
talk about the first three usage patterns.
And more importantly,
our participants' motivations behind these usage pattern.
The integrated pattern is what we found that participants
often use multiple devices together for related tasks.
For example, when attending a work meeting,
participants may use a laptop to a view
attendees' faces and join the camera feed,
but use their mobile phone to join the audio chat
and use pen enabled tablet to take notes.
We found that our participant and liked to
distributed the task to the device
that can best serve with the task's needs
to take the strength of different devices.
And in both work and personal multi-device usage.
Participant often need to share
content with other people,
either for remote collaboration with colleagues
or co-located activities with family members and friends.
The clone pattern was identified
from multi-device usage when
people duplicate a workspace
or an application to multiple devices.
For example, casting the laptop screen
to a TV screen to share media content
with family members.
When working on multiple unrelated task,
the partition usage,
lets people distribute unrelated task to
different devices to better
separate task and device that have different purposes,
especially in the context of working-from-home
and at the same time of home-at-work.
As one participant said:
"I do want to keep work mostly separate from home.
So I don't want to use my work device after hours."
which the findings presented on
multi-device physical configurations and usage patterns.
I want to highlight the design opportunities into areas.
First, researchers and
practitioners should consider building
novel technology to better
support individual multi-device usage pattern.
Take the integrate usage pattern as an example.
Prior work like panelrama,
discuss techniques to distribute
UI components to best-fit devices.
We think future research should
push further on this thread of work.
Consider the task requirements and
user motivations identified from people's real word
multi-device usage to help user better distribute
different UIs or
different UI components to different devices.
More importantly, our work found that people have
a rather fragmented the workflow with their
multi-device usage.
They often move between workspace
as well as moving between different usage pattern.
We believe that future research
should build both hardware and software solutions,
to help users better transition
between different device usage.
Prior work like migratory user interface
already suggests potential software solutions
and work like AirConstellations also suggest
solutions for transition
between different physical setups.
We think future research should also consider
existing usage patterns and the variety of devices,
ecologies that people own,
and develop solutions to better support
transitions in fragmented multi-device workflow.
You can read more about
our other findings and discussions in our paper.
Thank you for watching our presentation.