Smart Phone Use by Non-Mobile Business Users
Venue
MobileHCI 2011, ACM, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 445-454
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Patti Bao, Jeffrey Pierce, Stephen Whittaker, Shumin Zhai
BibTeX
Abstract
The rapid increase in smart phone capabilities has introduced new opportunities for
mobile information access and computing. However, smart phone use may still be
constrained by both device affordances and work environments. To understand how
current business users employ smart phones and to identify opportunities for
improving business smart phone use, we conducted two studies of actual and
perceived performance of standard work tasks. Our studies involved 243 smart phone
users from a large corporation. We intentionally chose users who primarily work
with desktops and laptops, as these “nonmobile” users represent the largest
population of business users. Our results go beyond the general intuition that
smart phones are better for consuming than producing information: we provide
concrete measurements that show how fast reading is on phones and how much slower
and more effortful text entry is on phones than on computers. We also demonstrate
that security mechanisms are a significant barrier to wider business smart phone
use. We offer design suggestions to overcome these barriers.
