Working Overtime: Patterns of Smartphone and PC Usage in the Day of an Information Worker

Research has demonstrated that information workers often manage several different computing devices in an effort to balance convenience, mobility, input efficiency, and content readability throughout their day. The high portability of the mobile phone has made it an increasingly valuable member of this ecosystem of devices. To understand how future technologies might better support productivity tasks as people transition between devices, we examined the mobile phone and PC usage patterns of sixteen information workers across several weeks. Our data logs, together with follow-up interview feedback from four of the participants, confirm that the phone is highly leveraged for digital information needs beyond calls and SMS, but suggest that these users do not currently traverse the device boundary within a given task.