Study: We touch our phones around 2,617 times a day
According to a new research, Android smartphone users on an average touch their smartphones around 2,617 times a day, reports Indian Express. The research found that the smartphone screen time was 2.42 hours for the average user, and 3.75 hours for the heavy user.
Research firm Dscout in the U.S. for the study employed a demographically diverse sample of 94 Android users from a pool of more than 100,000 participants. They then built an additional smartphone tool to track every user’s interaction across 5 days, 24 hours a day. These interactions involve typing out texts, scrolling through Facebook feeds, turning pages in Kindle books, and much more, all at short and frequent intervals.
Researchers found that people tapped, swiped and clicked an enormous 2,617 times each day, on average.
The heaviest users – the top 10% – were found to touch their smartphones almost twice as much, at 5,427 touches per day. Averaging out the numbers, the aforementioned figures mean the heaviest users are touching their devices a couple of million times in one year, Dscout says.
The company has been looking into whether interactions with smartphones have become burdensome.
“Each tap and swipe feels small and harmless. Just a tiny fraction of our brain power and physical effort,” but to what extent are the interactions not good, it wonders.
Here are the key notes from the study:
Users prefer to keep smartphone sessions on the shorter side with rare cases of long usage times
The average users engaged in 76 separate phone sessions a day, totaling 2.42 hours. Heavy users (the top 10 per cent) averaged 132 sessions a day, totaling 3.75 hours. The longer usage times were far less preferred such as either watching a video on Netflix or reading a book in the Kindle app, to shorter browsing sessions with numerous breaks.
A major portion of interactions are spent within messaging and social apps
Users on an average spent 26% of their time on messaging apps and 22% of their time on social media app interactions. Further, 10% of their time was spent on internet search browsing. In addition, Facebook had the most number of touches at 15%, followed by native messaging at 11%, home screen at 9% and Chrome at 5%.
During the day, usage time explodes at key points
Researchers found that activity drops (but far from disappears) in the predawn hours. In fact 87 percent “of participants checked their phones, and brought them out of a sleep state, at least once between midnight and 5 a.m.” over the five-day sample period.
However, the average number of touches began as soon as participants woke up around 7 a.m. and increased through the evening.
Finally, the popularity of micro-interactions, especially within messaging and social apps, offers important visions into user behavior for businesses.
Source: Business Insider
