Select & Apply: understanding how users act upon objects across devices

Abstract

As our interactions increasingly cut across diverse devices, we often encounter situations where we find information on one device but wish to use it on another device, for instance, a phone number spotted on a public display but wanted on a mobile. We conceptualize this problem as Select & Apply and contribute two user studies where we presented participants with eight different scenarios involving different device combinations, applications and data types. In the first, we used a think-aloud methodology to gain insights on how users currently accomplish such tasks and how they ideally would like to accomplish them. In the second, we conducted a focus group study to investigate which factors influence their actions. Results indicate shortcomings in present support for Select & Apply and contribute a better understanding of which factors affect cross-device interaction.