How Carat Affects User Behavior: Implications for Mobile Battery Awareness Applications

Mobile devices have limited battery life, and numerous battery management applications are available that aim to improve it. This paper examines a large-scale mobile battery awareness application, called Carat, to see how it changes user behavior with long-term use. We conducted a survey of current Carat Android users and analyzed their interaction logs. The results show that long-term Carat users save more battery, charge their devices less often, learn to manage their battery with less help from Carat, have a better understanding of how Carat works, and may enjoy competing against other users. Based on these findings, we propose a set of guidelines for mobile battery awareness applications: battery awareness applications should make the reasoning behind their recommendations understandable to the user, be tailored to retain long-term users, take the audience into account when formulating feedback, and distinguish third-party and system applications.

Authors: Kumaripaba Athukorala, Eemil Lagerspetz, Maria von Kügelgen, Antti Jylhä, Adam Oliner, Sasu Tarkoma, Giulio Jacucci
Publication Date: April 2014
Conference: CHI (International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction)
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