Discovery of smartphone user group profiling based on user’s motivations and usage behaviors through focus group interviews

Abstract

Smartphone overuse is a growing social concern especially for adolescents and young adults. There has been attempts to mitigate smartphone overuse, however these trials mainly focused on curtailing usage time, disregarding users’ various usage contexts. The objective of this research is to profile smartphone users by understanding their needs and goals of smartphone usages to suggest personalized guidelines to help develop healthy smartphone usage habits. Focus- group interviews were conducted on twenty (13 male, 7 female, M = 28.4, SD = 2.7) young adults. Five smartphone usage behavior indexes conveying users’ needs and motivations (communication, entertainment, functional tool, information search, and life logging) were used as criteria for profiling user groups. As a result, three groups (Social Fun Seeking, Leisure Activity Seeking, and Information Seeking) were classified. Problematic smartphone usage behaviors for each group are defined and preventive guidelines for healthy smartphone usage are suggested.