Opportunistic Nudges for Task Migration Between Personal Devices

Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24) |

Published by ACM

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Using multiple devices to exploit their strengths and mechanics for a task is referred to as “migration.” However, re-establishing context upon moving from one device to another can be cumbersome.

We propose opportunistic nudges as a way to more seamlessly share content between personal devices. Opportunistic nudges appear in the bezel when a device migration occurs and can be interacted with to quickly share files and applications. However, if the user ignores them, they automatically disappear after some time.

We explore the design space of opportunistic nudges through rapid prototyping and develop a preliminary design space consisting of four stages. Focusing on six design parameters of the Visualization stage, we gather feedback on the concept through an exploratory user study.

Results show that opportunistic nudges can be an effective way to reduce the transaction costs of sharing content between devices.

Figure 1: Opportunistic nudges enable lightweight migration between devices: (a) capturing a photo on a phone causes (b) a nudge to appear on nearby devices; (c) interacting with it on another device (d) shares content and migrates the task to that device.

Figure 2: Opportunistic nudges consist of four stages: (a) the Context (e.g., two devices); (b) the Trigger (e.g., taking a photo); (c) the Visualization (e.g., a thumbnail of the photo); and (d) the Action (e.g., clicking the nudge and dragging to copy the photo to the laptop). Our work focuses on the Visualization stage.

 

Figure 6: Prototyped scenarios: (a) content shared through device proximity; (b) ad hoc sharing with tilt; (c) sharing documents and applications when a touch- or pen-enabled device is picked up; and (d) sharing clipboard content after a copy command.