Field study on college students’ uses and gratifications of multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices

Abstract

In order to deeply understand college students’ multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices, we conducted a field study with the experience sampling method. We tracked 25 college students for 14 days about their multitasking activities and the dynamic characteristics of behavior motivations and feelings from the perspective of Uses and Gratifications. The participants reported their multitasking activities according to the designated format via WeChat. The researchers coded the qualitative data and classified multitasking activities into three types. It was found that multitasking with relevant content on different devices outperformed the other multitasking types in gratifying cognitive need. To the opposite, multitasking with irrelevant content on different devices was found to serve better at gratifying emotional need than the other multitasking types. The implications for designing cross-platform collaborative user experience in the era of smart computing were discussed.