This is how people use digital devices in the real world
What I learned from a day navigating the device landscape
One Saturday afternoon, I made plans to visit three different groups of people — they’re my family and friends so I often spend time with them but on that occasion I was curious to see which digital platforms they used.
Let’s play: adventures in gaming
The first place I visited was that of a 24-year-old friend, who I sometimes play video games with. Let’s call him Ed. Being an amateur gamer with little free time, Ed doesn’t watch as much linear TV as some of our mutual friends. He gets home from work every day and settles in front of a PC monitor, to which he connects his PlayStation 4.
He spends money on other gadgets for entertainment. When I walk inside his house, I’m graced with the sight of his flatmate standing in the middle of the living room, flailing his arms in a slow swimming-dog motion with a VR headset covering his eyes.
Usually, people connect stand-alone VR headsets to desktop computers or their televisions, but Ed owns a ‘VR-ready’ laptop. His preference is to have a more mobile set-up for his computers and isn’t a serious enough PC gamer to want a desktop.
Courtesy of Oculus Rift, his flatmate is now rock climbing in a canyon, letting out occasional screams brought on by vertigo when he moves his head. While the flatmate goes on a wild adventure, Ed holds his smartphone which is playing a music video. This prompts a fun fact: globally, 47% of music consumption happens on YouTube. Music though is only a small part of Ed’s trips to YouTube. Each time he navigates its gaming channel, he gets lost for hours. A quick look at YouTube’s press-dedicated page tells us that more than 70% of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices.
A visitor would be quick to notice there’s no TV around, which naturally keeps the two flatmates away from broadcast and pay TV. Instead, they use Ed’s PS4, through which they subscribe to several different streaming platforms — watching programmes on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and MUBI. One of the perks of this, according to Ed, is being able to keep watching across devices.
Ed’s example fits recent reports on mobile video: in 2019, a regular OTT customer owns 3 devices where they can watch content and subscribe to 3 different services. The device Ed uses most outside the house is, without question, his smartphone. When he’s at home, however, the PS4 is what grips his attention. He also enjoys mobile gaming — which now officially makes up the majority of the global gaming market — but that’s not the device he uses when he invites friends over. After a few rounds of Rocket League on the PS4, I’m off to my next visit.
Letting off st(r)eam: screen-free journeys
I get on a train that takes me to my cousin’s home, where she lives with her husband and their two children. I’ve decided to listen again to the song Ed was playing on YouTube, so I open the Spotify app to search for it.
I spend about 7 hours every working day looking at a computer screen, and the rest of my waking hours either looking at my phone or my TV. It’s in these intervals I choose to avoid screens altogether to give my eyes a rest. Besides providing a break for the eyes, music streaming apps are also fuelling the audio renaissance currently underway with podcasts and audiobooks.
Earlier this year, Spotify bought two podcasting companies, Gimlet and Anchor, which caused significant waves in the content media business about the opportunities in this area. Podcasts are increasingly proving to be effective for advertising and efficient in reaching audiences, as hosts become influencers and give more credibility to the products advertised.
It runs in the family: modern habits
I arrive at my next stop — with eyes rested — to encounter a different reality. The house is in a post-lunch haze, with everyone still lingering around the dining table. The hosts’ elder child, a 9 year-old boy, is immersed in the family tablet. His younger sister, next to him, alternates between looking at the tablet and at the smart TV across the room, where an animated film about gnomes is on. I sit down to have some dessert and start chatting to the adults.
About half an hour later, I hear the 7 year-old girl saying, ‘Alexa, what is the meaning of realtor?’ I ask my cousin how often her daughter does this, sparking a conversation about controlling the use of this audio device around the house. The parents rely on it for news and weather every morning, but the children use it mostly for music. 92% of people claim they use their smart speaker for news and weather information, and 88% ask for answers to general questions.
When I ask them what the biggest benefit of this device is, my cousin’s husband is quick to mention they barely pick up a smartphone when they’re in the house. The children certainly don’t, as they have a tablet to play with and are often watching Netflix on the TV.
A shelf in the TV unit holds a small Roku set-top box. The main live television being watched in the house is football, through a pay-as-you-go app, and only occasionally when a week’s loaded with big matches. My cousin says besides these channels, Roku offers hundreds of free channels. When it’s mostly the children watching, cable TV is an unnecessary expense.
By the time the film ends, the young girl has already shifted her attention to the tablet alone. Her brother’s playing Minecraft, the game that allows players to build worlds out of blocks. In 2018, it averaged 91 million active users.
I want to walk to my next, and final, location because it’s close enough, but I look at the dark grey clouds forming and ask if anyone knows if it’s supposed to rain. Before anyone says anything back, I hear my cousin raise her voice: ‘Alexa, is it going to rain today?’ Alexa says there’s a good chance. I take the risk and get moving.
Watch your steps: tracking time and device use
It’s a 15-minute walk to another friend’s house, where a sports viewing party is due to start. Just before I arrive, my smartwatch vibrates furiously on my wrist: I’ve reached 12,000 steps, my fitness goal for the day. Since buying the device, my attention to physical activity has increased a lot. If I’m idle for an hour, it buzzes for me to move. Healthcare monitoring — as well as fitness — is a key factor driving demand for smartwatches.
It’s helping me particularly to control my screen time. Before the smartwatch, I would look at my smartphone dozens of times during the day to check on notifications, which would inevitably throw me into a social media scrolling spree. Feeling the notifications on my wrist means I pick up my phone only when I have something to check on it.
Sharing the screen: live sports in 2019
I enter yet another house devoid of a ‘traditional’ TV viewing experience. A mix of 10 people, mostly women, occupy the main lounge. We were all invited to watch a streaming session of a live football match. Some people stand chatting around a table with snacks in the corner, but the rest are already sitting in the available seats. The match, an FA Women’s Super League match between Arsenal and Bristol, is being broadcast on FAWSL’s Facebook page for free.
With no TV or monitor to be found in the house, the host’s laptop is connected to a projector on the ceiling, which in turn plays the image on a canvas screen covering big part of a wall. I find myself a seat and notice who’s actually looking at the screen. Of the 6 sitting down, only 2 are not looking at a smartphone. According to a survey, 60% of users want real-time information about the live sport they watch, primarily through social media.
All of us at the party have been drawn to it because it’s available on Facebook and because the popularity of women’s football has grown over the past year. Still, for most of us, it’s an opportunity to spend an afternoon together. That said, besides the habitual Instagram check and Whatsapp messaging, comments are made about a different match that had ended and other breaking news. We celebrate goals and briefly talk about the future of live sport broadcasting. We agree it looks good.
When the music stops: observations
Seeing my friends and family use certain devices wasn’t about taking a roll call of the tech brands which permeate so many of our lives. It also wasn’t a proper ‘user insights’ analysis but rather a number of observations to learn more about how people use digital products.
I captured times of leisure, off work, shared with family and friends. Among these people, some commute to work on a daily basis, some have jobs, and others study. Their daily lives differ; the time they spend with each of the devices I specified and the motives behind their use will also vary throughout the week. It’s important not to make wild claims about how a small group can be representative of an age group, social class, or generation.
We’ve talked before in this blog about how personas can be a problem when creating digital products. A recent UKOM report, for example, found the ‘mobile only’ (smartphones and tablets) audience is split across all age ranges, revealing the all-encompassing nature of new technology and the market’s own broad scope.
The most evident aspect of my journey is the importance of location — not just when I was inside people’s homes but the journeys in between, which are their own special places and give rise to particular behaviours.
Gathering data on how different users explore the device landscape is an important part of how we work at Ostmodern. We often look at studies and reports that refer to screen time, app popularity, content consumption, connectivity and activity trends, as well as observing how our clients’ audiences use a service.
As digital designers, learning how real audiences connect with devices in real-world situations helps us to design and build useful products, and to make sense of the data we have — instead of pushing our users to fit the data or the product.
Watching people and asking questions about how they navigate information and content reminds us that purpose, honesty, and context cannot be neglected. They’re often the key to innovation.
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