Automating SmartPhone Automation: Enhancing User Experience with Behaviour Learning

Smart phones nowadays form an integral part of our lives. Their persistent befriending demands frequent interaction not only to use their features but also to interact with phone settings to appropriate them to changing scenarios. Settings-based tasks such as muting sound during meetings while critical are typically tedious and disruptive and can be avoided by automating such tasks. Current smart phone automation apps require configuring explicit rules which users may find gratuitously complicated. Using a User-Centred Design approach, we designed a smart phone automation app which incorporates behaviour pattern recognition and routine learning to achieve intelligent and context-aware automation without overburdening the users. Usability and usefulness evaluations conducted in our study have provided valuable insight into user preferences to guide smart phone automation design. Automating smart phone automation in this way provides freedom from constant manual setting changes and from the overhead of manually configuring automation tools for a more seamless user experience.