How To Study Mobile Behaviour Prospective (SmartPhone)

mobile devices from a quantitative angle, quoting poll results to identify trends in people’s behaviour with their phones. For example, Brandbank 2011 mCommerce study reports that 85% of smartphone users have used their devices in the process of shopping, with 36% of them having used their smartphones to find more information about a product.


Studying mobile behaviour is an important part of our on-going research at web4africa, onlineplan9ja.com. Our aim is to capture a rich picture of how people behave on the move and inform the design of new apps and mobile user experiences in general. If 85% of users are using their devices in the process of shopping, what's the experience like? What are they really using, for how long, and when? What else is happening around them when they interact with their phones on the go and how does this affect their interactions? Which activities performed through smartphones have (or haven't) become part of our daily routines? What are the barriers that stop us?


In order to answer these and other questions we designed a study of mobile shopping behaviour from an ethnographic perspective, studying real users in real situations. This posed the extra challenge of observing people on the move. Smartphones aren't always used in a static way, and the context of mobility can't be reproduced in a lab setting. Interviews alone wouldn't give us a reliable account of people's behaviour and activity patterns when on the go.

We solved this issue by applying different forms of qualitative data collection. We studied the context of mobility by periodically and systematically observing and taking notes of people’s behaviours on the go. In addition to this, we set up a diary study where participants were asked to record any shopping-related activity that they were carrying out with their smartphones at any time of the day. At the end of the study, we also interviewed participants to probe their use of smartphones in more details.