An In-Situ Study of Mobile App& Mobile Search InteractionsJuan Pablo CarrascalPompeu Fabra Universityjp.carrascal@upf.eduKaren ChurchYahoo Labskchurch@yahoo-inc.comABSTRACTWhen trying to satisfy an information need, smartphone usersfrequently transition from mobile search engines to mobileapps and vice versa. However, little is known about the na-ture of these transitions nor how mobile search and mobileapps interact. We report on a 2-week, mixed-method studyinvolving 18 Android users, where we collected real-worldmobile search and mobile app usage data alongside subjectiveinsights on why certain interactions between apps and mobilesearch occur. Our results show that when people engage withmobile search they tend to interact with more mobile appsand for longer durations. We found that certain categories ofapps are used more intensely alongside mobile search. Fur-thermore we found differences in app usage before and af-ter mobile search and show how mobile app interactions canboth prompt mobile search and enable users to take action.We conclude with a discussion on what these patterns meanfor mobile search and how we might design mobile searchexperiences that take these app interactions into account.Author KeywordsMobile Search; Mobile Apps; User StudyGeneral TermsHuman FactorsACM Classif i cation KeywordsH.5.2 Information interfaces and presentation: MiscellaneousINTRODUCTIONPeopleadoptarangeofingeniousmethodswhentryingtosat-isfy their daily information needs but the Internet has becomethe dominant means of f inding information for smartphoneusers in particular [6]. A recent comScore report 1 shows thatmobile devices accounted for 55% of Internet usage in theUnited States in January 2014. Native mobile apps made upthe majority of that traff ic (85%), while the remaining 15%came from mobile browsers. With a wealth of informationseeking apps at their f ingertips, mobile users can now issue1 Mobile apps overtake PC Internet usage in U.S., See:cnn-mon.ie/1cfHe0ZPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor prof it or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita-tion on the f irst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others thanACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re-publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specif ic permissionand/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org.CHI 2015, April 18 - 23 2015, Seoul, Republic of Korea Copyright is held bythe owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3145-6/15/04$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702486queries directly from within these apps. For example, Yelpcan be used to search for local businesses, Google Maps canbeusedtof inddirections, whileIMDBcanbeusedtolookformovie reviews. Thus the boundaries between mobile searchengines and mobile apps have become blurred.Smartphone users sometimes switch between mobile searchand other mobile apps to satisfy their information needs.Brown et al. [4] describes one such switching interactionin which mobile search and mobile maps are used inter-changeably — with search being used to f ind informationabout certain places and maps being used to get directionsto those places. It’s likely that such switching interactionsoccur across a diverse range of everyday apps, i.e. beyondjust maps applications. One of the goals of this work is tounderstand such switching behaviors.Past research has also shown that mobile search can be trig-gered by our conversations and our surroundings [1, 7, 9, 24].Furthermore, the results of mobile search can feed into nextactions and plans [4]. Thus it’s likely that some of these mo-bile search triggers and actions may relate to or be supportedby interactions with mobile apps. For example, a text mes-sage from a friend may prompt a search or after searching fora local restaurant, a person may call to make a dinner reser-vation. The goal of this paper is to explore these interactionsand to investigate if and how mobile search and app usagerelates to mobile search triggers and actions.While patterns of mobile app usage and mobile search havebeen studied separately [3, 18, 11, 2, 8, 13, 14, 26, 27, 22],the relationships between them have not been examined in-depth. A detailed study of in-situ app and search engineuse will provide insights into how we can support more en-riching cross app and search engine experiences, and assistmobile users in completing their daily information seekingtasks. To shed light on these interactions we conducted a 2-week mixed-method study involving 18 Android users. Wecombined interviews, a daily online diary and real-world mo-bile usage data to gather rich insights into mobile informationseeking behaviors. Over the 2-week period we collected ap-proximately 54,000 mobile app launches, over 840 mobilesearch sessions and over 500 diary entries. Our results high-light that when users engage in mobile search activity, theyinteract more with other mobile apps and for longer dura-tions. Furthermore certain categories of mobile apps are moreprevalent in sessions involving search, compared to sessionswith no search activity. Our core contributions are:• We def ine and introduce cross app and search interactionsas an important and challenging research opportunity in thef ield of mobile HCI and mobile information retrieval.Understanding Everyday Use of Mobile Phones CHI 2015, Crossings, Seoul, Korea2739
