Exploring User Behavior and Preferences in the Wild with Mobile Apps: Lessons Learned from Four Case Studies

Mobile apps running on smartphones have not only become a popular means for providing mobile services. Due to their relatively easy and cheap implementation, they have also developed into scientific tools for studying mobile human-computer interaction (HCI) in realistic usage contexts, providing qualitative and quantitative data about usage patterns and user preferences with a high degree of ecological validity. In this paper, we provide some insights into the potential of such apps, which have been gained in four case studies. We describe the rationale of the studies, some general implementation details, as well as insights into user behavior and preferences that are based on the collected data. This way, we hope to stimulate others to perform similar research, and to provide exchangeable standards for data collection through mobile apps.