LV-Linker: Supporting Linked Exploration of Phone Usage Log Data and Screen Video Data

TL;DR

LV-Linker is a visualization tool that links smartphone app usage logs with screen videos, enabling researchers to analyze usage behaviors more efficiently, especially for long videos and novice users.

Contribution

The paper introduces LV-Linker, a novel tool that links app usage logs with videos to facilitate easier and faster analysis of smartphone usage data.

Findings

Linking reduces task completion time.

Linking decreases perceived workload.

Participants found linking helpful.

Abstract

Prior HCI studies often analyzed smartphone app usage data for usability and user experience research purposes. App usage videos are often collected by a screen recording app in order to better analyze the app usage behaviors (e.g., app usage time, screen transition, and notification handling). However, it is difficult to analyze app usage videos along with multiple user interaction stream data. When the length of a video is long, data analysis tends to take a long time due to the volume of user interaction data. This is even more difficult for novice researchers due to a lack of data analysis experience. In this paper, we propose LV-Linker (Log and Video Linker), a visualization tool that helps researchers quickly explore the app usage log and video data by linking multiple time series log data with the video data. We conducted a preliminary user study with eight participants to evaluate the benefits of linking, by measuring task completion time, helpfulness, and subjective task workload. Our results showed that offering a linking feature significantly lowers the task completion time and task workload.