DOI: 10.5061/dryad.gqnk98sp9
title: Emergent smartphone users' dataset

description: The effective utilization of a communication channel like calling a person
 involves two steps. The first step is storing the contact information of
 another user, and the second step is finding contact information to
 initiate a voice or text communication. However, the current smartphone
 interfaces for contact management are mainly textual; which leaves many
 emergent users at a severe disadvantage in using this most basic
 functionality to the fullest. Previous studies indicated that
 less-educated users adopt various coping strategies to store and identify
 contacts. However, all of these studies investigated the contact
 management issues of these users from a qualitative angle. Although
 qualitative or subjective investigations are very useful, they generally
 need to be augmented by a quantitative investigation for a comprehensive
 problem understanding. This work presents an exploratory study to identify
 the usability issues and coping strategies in contact management by
 emergent users; by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative
 approaches. We identified coping strategies of the Pakistani population
 and the effectiveness of these strategies through a semi-structured
 qualitative study of 15 participants and a usability study of 9
 participants, respectively. We then obtained logged data of 30 emergent
 and 30 traditional users, including contact-books and dual-channel (call
 and text messages) logs to infer a more detailed understanding; and to
 analyse the differences in the composition of contact-books of both user
 groups. The analysis of the log data confirmed problems that affect the
 emergent users’ communication behaviour due to the various difficulties
 they face in storing and searching contacts. Our findings revealed serious
 usability issues in current communication interfaces over smartphones. The
 emergent users were found to have smaller contact-books and preferred
 voice communication due to reading/writing difficulties. They also
 reported taking help from others for contact saving and text reading. The
 alternative contact management strategies adopted by our participants
 include: memorizing whole number or last few digits to recall important
 contacts; adding special character sequence with contact numbers for
 better recall; writing a contact from scratch rather than searching it in
 the phone-book; voice search; and use of recent call logs to redial a
 contact. The identified coping strategies of emergent users could aid the
 developers and designers to come up with solutions according to emergent
 users’ mental models and needs.
description: We collected logged data of 30 emergent and 30 traditional users,
 including contact-books and dual-channel (call and text messages) logs by
 using a customized Android application. The contact-book logs contain each
 contact’s name, number, and the total number of saved contacts of the
 user. While the call and text logs contain the following information for
 each communication event (call or text): contact name/number, time, date,
 duration, and status (incoming, outgoing, missed). We
 adopted a quantitative and programmatic approach and compared the log
 information of both user groups. We used R as a programming tool to see
 how the composition of the contact-book of emergent users differ from
 those of traditional users in aspects like its size, prevalence use of
 special symbols, the proportion of dialled contacts through the
 phone-book, and percentage of unintelligible contact names, etc.  Data
 cleaning was performed before analysing it to avoid misleading
 results.
description: Data is cleaned. All inconsistencies and erroneous records have
 been removed. These two datasets are used to see how the composition of
 the contact-book of emergent users differ from those of traditional users
 in aspects like its size, prevalence use of special symbols, the
 proportion of dialed contacts through the phone-book, and percentage of
 unintelligible contact names, etc.  Aggregated data for 30 emergent users
 and 30 traditional users is provided in the form of CSV files to replicate
 the data analysis results.  To reproduce the graphs for usability
 analysis, R scripts are also provided in the same repository. These
 scripts contain the required data vectors.  These graphs show the
 efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction of emergent users on
 conventional contact-book interfaces.