Newport is a collaborative application for sharing context (e.g. location) and content (e.g. photos and notes) during obile phone calls. People can share during a phone call and sharing ends when the call ends. Newport also supports using a computer during a call to make it easier to share content from the phone or launch screen sharing if the caller is also at a computer. Participants in a 12 person study preferred using Newport to current methods for these tasks. They also preferred limiting sharing location to phone calls compared with publishing it continuously. Tying sharing to a phone call gives individuals a social sense of security, providing a mechanism for exchanging information with unknown people.

The impact of interruptions on workflow and productivity has been extensively studied in the PC domain, but little formal evidence exists of its effect on mobile productivity. Using a survey and a screenshot-based diary study we investigated the types of barriers people face when performing tasks on their mobile phones, the ways they follow up with such suspended tasks, and how frustrating the experience of task disruption is for mobile users. Our data suggest that moving to a PC to complete a phone task is common, yet not inherently problematic, depending on the task. We relate our findings to prior design guidelines for desktop workflow, and discuss how the guidelines can be extended to mitigate disruptions to mobile taskflow.

In this work we explored whether sharing a user’s web browsing activity across their computing devices can make it easier to find and access web sites on a mobile device. A survey of 175 smartphone users about their web use across multiple devices suggested that people share web information between devices, but generally used cumbersome manual methods to do so. We then tracked the web sites visited by 14 participants on their PC and mobile phone, and used experience-sampling surveys to determine whether sharing sites across devices would be useful. We found that participants visited many of the same sites on both their mobile device and PC, and that participants were interested in viewing additional sites from their PC on their mobile device.

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. 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.