The consumption of integrated social networking services on mobile devices

Some mobile devices automatically fetch content from social networking services and integrate it into the device user interface. In this paper, we explore how people consume integrated social networking services in a field study with an innovative aggregator named Linked Internet UI Concept, or LinkedUI. Twenty users completed the field study. We logged their activities and performed user interviews. The study reveals two main use cases: habitual checking where users frequently glanced at the integrated services at short intervals; and serendipitous content discovery where they come across some content when performing other tasks. The study also reveals that the users only attended to a small proportion of the full content set, such as content recently published and content from selected contacts. This indicates the user need of quick access to relevant content.