Do you use your phone when commuting? Many people use their mobile devices such as mobile phone, tablet or even laptop on public transits thanks to the convenience of the technology. While people are using their mobile devices on public transit, they are actually simultaneously doing another task that can easily be neglected, that is, traveling. Here, travel task means monitoring cues that indicate when they should get off the transit.
What is Travel-based Multitasking?
Where do the potential challenges come from?
People’s attention is limited
Dynamic environment on public transits
task-at-hand
travel task
RQ#1 What are travel multitaskers’ behavioral patterns and motivation?
RQ#2 What challenges do travel multitaskers encounter?
In this research, we focus on the following research questions:
We invited the participants to a semi-structured interview and dived deeper into their multitasking experience over the preceding six months. We asked the participants to walk through their travel-multitasking experiences, including their choices of tasks and technology; the reasons behind those choices; the way they do their tasks, their feelings/attitudes within the journey; their multitasking processes and outcomes; and the challenges and barriers they had encountered along different stages of their journeys, including waiting, riding, and disembarking.
Dive Deeper - Semi-structure Interview
STEP 3
After observation, we gave participants a 30-minute debriefing interview. The goal of the debriefing interview is a quick clarification of the participant’s in situ perceptions, feelings, experiences, and reasons behind their multitasking decisions within the previous journey that might have been difficult to recall in a subsequent semi-structured interview.
Clarify what we See - Debriefing Interview
STEP 2
STEP 1
Shadowing
We aim to understand how people multitask within their natural environment, public transportation, specifically focus on the behaviors that may be difficult to obtain through retrospection in the interviews such as their attention-switching, habitual phone use, and autonomous responses to the environment.
User Study
Our recruitment involves two stages. In this stage, we captured an overview of travel-multitasking scenarios. Our screening focused on reaching diverse participants and scenarios.
In the second stage, we had established a series of theoretical categories based on our first stage data by using qualitative coding process. Our recruitment at that point focused mainly on the travel-multitasking scenarios that had not sufficiently captured in our data.
Our user study involves three steps:
Two Stage of Recruitment
Shadowing + Interviews
Research Process
Literature Review
Qualitative Coding using Atlas.ti
Plan Research
&
Pilot Study
Problem Define
Conduct Research
Data Analysis
Generate Finding
&
Paper Writing
Multi-method
Field study + Interview
Discussion & Design Implication
Different motivation can lead to different level of intention to complete task-at-hand, which can affect how passengers distribute their attention when multitasking on public transit.
Conflicts between travel tasks and task-at-hands arise from limited attention and overlapping modalities between travel task cues and task-at-hand.
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Collect passengers’ motivation through profile-building or
contextual questionnaire
Customized time- or position-based reminders
Provide diverse channels of cues to ensure that they are accessible for every passengers
Whether people encounter conflicts between travel-tasks and tasks-at-hand can be influenced by their familiarity with their travel journey, and their uncertainty on specific transportation mode.
Enhance passengers’ awareness of the characteristics of their upcoming journeys
Challenges to travel-multitasking on public transits are categorized in two aspects:
What are their Challenges?
Unavailability of Clear Cues cause passengers’ attention frequently distracted when seeking alternatives
"I had to look out the windows. Some buses don’t broadcast, don’t know why, may be it’s broken, so I can’t focus on listening to the radio."
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Passengers are not receptive to the cues while concentrating on their task-at-hand
"When I arrived at the station, I’m like, ’Oh my God! I got here!’, and I grabbed all my belongings and threw them into the bag. But it turned out that I have missed my stop."
Passengers don’t trust the cues and have to validate between multiple sources
"I feel the info showing current stop on the app is sometimes inaccurate, so I have to double check using Goole Map . It makes me cannot focus on my work"
Challenges in Carrying out the Travel Task & Task-at-Hand Simultaneously
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Challenges from the Dynamic Environment of Public transportation
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Finding 2
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Findings
Unstable and vibrating vehicles negatively impact task quality, and at worst, made the participants uncomfortable or placed them in danger.
“When the intercity bus wobbled, it would make me suddenly unable to find which line I was reading [...]. So, I had to highlight the line I’m reading, so I can know if I lose my place later, I’ll know where to continue reading from”
Constantly changing passengers and close contact with them influence participants’ seat choices but also distract them from their tasks-at-hand.
“I want to avoid people who are sneezing, and if they don’t cover their mouths, I’m more likely to be infected. So, I used to stand at the end of the car”
Privacy and the pressure comes from personal image can affect participants’ task choice.
“If I need to pay with a credit card for online shopping, I will try to use it at home, because I have no way to fully ensure my privacy on public transportation”
“I rarely read books in daily life, but do so on public transportation. [...] Reading books looks cool, I think [laughter].”
We identified four patterns of travel-multitasking behaviors based on their motivations.
Four Travel-based Multitasking Patterns
Habitual Phubber
Incentive to task
“It’s probably just an unconscious thing, for no particular reason"
Context-suite Task Lover
Incentive to task
“On the MRT, your attention is always drawn back to your current environment, and this makes you also quite alert and attentive to what is on the podcast.”
Meaningful Time Seeker
Incentive to task
“Mostly I see taking high-speed rail as a luxury, so I would hope to be productive when I do it [...] So I will try my best to make this worth it.”
Last-minute Worker
Incentive to task
“I had to squat down and take out my computer, find a space, and then put the computer on my knee to do my work. It was not an ideal situation. Very crowded, but I had to do it.”
Finding 1
© 2023 by Hazel Tsai
Data Analysis
We analyzed our data from shadowing (observation notes) and interviews through qualitative coding. We coded our data in ATLAS.ti and synthesized themes and categories to form our codebook.
Field Study into Travel-Multitasking Behavior
Overview
TIn this project, we aim to understand passengers' behaviors and challenges while multitasking on the public transportation. We conducted a multi-methods study that involved shadowing and interviewing with 30 public transportation passengers. We delivered the research outcome through academic paper and is accepted by 2023 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023).
My role
Plan Research
Conduct Research
Qualitative Data Analysis
Paper Writing
Present research in CHI 2023
Duration
15 months
Tools
Figma
Google Excel (Card Sorting Data)
Atlas.ti
