Planning, Apps, and the High-End Smartphone: Exploring the Landscape of Modern Cross-Device Reaccess

The rapid growth of mobile devices has made it challenging for users to maintain a consistent digital history among all their personal devices. Even with a variety of cloud computing solutions, users continue to redo web searches and reaccess web content that they already interacted with on another device. This paper presents insights into the cross-device reaccess habits of 15 smartphone users. We studied how they reaccessed content between their computer and smartphone through a combination of data logging, a screenshot-based diary study, and user interviews. From 1276 cross-device reaccess events we found that users reaccess content between their phone and computer with comparable frequency, and that users rarely planned ahead for their reaccess needs. Based on our findings, we present opportunities for building future mobile systems to support the unplanned activities and content reaccess needs of mobile users.