"I thought she would like to read it": Exploring Sharing Behaviors in the Context of Declining Mobile Web Use

The use of applications on mobile devices has changed dramatically over the past few years. While web browsing was once a common activity, it's now reported that 86% of time on mobile phones is in apps other than the browser. We set out to understand how the mobile web was currently fitting into people's lives and what web sessions looked like. Finding a dramatic reduction in mobile web revisi-tation rates compared to previous work and that a large number of sessions comprised single page views, we then studied how web content was shared with others in mobile messaging, the source of many single page sessions. The HCI community has not heavily studied this sharing activity that many people perform daily. We conclude with design implications for new mobile applications from our two studies with a combined 287 participants where we studied actual logs of mobile web use and link sharing behavior.