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Left to our own devices

New patterns of multi-device-behavior at work

As I write, a couple of Apple and Android tablets sit by my desk. What are they for?

That’s a good question. Just last year, I used them regularly, traveling with a tablet and bluetooth keyboard rather than a heavy laptop. Now? Perhaps I will check email while lounging with some coffee. I browse social networks - cat videos! - because tablets are great media devices. But I rarely use one for serious work. My lightweight laptop is great for travel and office alike.

Signals and patterns

It’s not just me. Chromebooks are rapidly gaining market-share and mind-share in education from iPads. Business users and IT departments who demanded native tablet applications a couple of years ago, now rarely even mention the devices. And tablets themselves are developing in new directions, becoming smaller and cheaper at one end of the market, while “pro” tablets add larger screens and keyboards to compete with laptops.

Product designers are challenged not only to observe, but to anticipate such social, personal and technological shifts. As the saying goes, “You must have your ear to the ground to keep your head above water.”

With this mind, my team have focused recent research not only on how people use smartphones, tablets and personal computers, but rather on the patterns that emerge when they use these devices together. This interaction between tools has been quite neglected, particularly in business.

In the consumer market, we have seen some fascinating research from Google, showing, for example, that over 70% of people watching soccer on television, do so with a laptop, tablet or smartphone nearby. And they use those devices during the game – to search for information on players, statistics and other results.

With this type of interaction in mind, we set out to research through surveys and interviews some of the patterns we might find when business users also have multiple devices. Overall, it was clear that people regularly switch between devices to complete business tasks. Different devices - whether a watch, phone, tablet or laptop - could be convenient in different contexts, so an activity may start on the best device to hand and then switch to another device. This gives us important clues to the preferred devices for certain tasks.

Have you stopped taking the tablets?

Some media activities, such as watching videos and conferencing, are popular on tablets. On the other hand, although business users may start working on a document on a tablet, 79% of them will switch to a computer to complete the task.

This reluctance to switch to a tablet is also true for reports and dashboards. 55% of users switch from a tablet to a computer to view these BI artifacts: only 20% would switch the other way round. It is tempting to think that this is because the mobile form-factor is not sufficient for viewing reports and dashboards. However, if users start this activity on a phone, 52% of them will complete the activity there. No-one, not one, reported moving from a smartphone to a tablet. And if the activity starts on a tablet, only 25% of users will continue there.

The age gap

Research such as this can be very useful on its own, but it is even better as a springboard for discussion and debate. One topic comes up almost every time we discuss these new modes of user behavior – they difference between generations of users. Mature business users certainly feel that younger generations are more skilled with devices, but also more addicted to them! However, our research came up with some interesting alternative interpretations.

For example, Anders Gran of the UsTwo design consultancy (who have designed award-winning iPad games) has some sharp-edged opinions on how different generations use devices: “If I go to restaurants it’s older people that are normally misbehaving with phones, in that they’re noisy all the time, they’re on the table, it’s ringing. Because they’re not fluent in the medium, or they think that’s how it’s used, or they accept the default setting of the phones.” In other words, older users may be more irritating with their devices than younger, more aware, users.

Our own devices

Perhaps the most important thing we learned from our research is simply this: as users, we no longer focus our efforts on a single device. Rather looking at the world from one viewpoint, with a single experience, we choose our point of view, our interactions and our ways of working with the right device at the right time in the right place for our purpose.

The challenge, for businesses and IT departments and for software designers will be to make sure we have the right tools to hand whenever and wherever we need them.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Donald Farmer .