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Nađa Terzimehić, Sarah Aragon-Hahner, Heinrich Hussmann
The Tale of a Complicated Relationship: Insights from Users' Love/Breakup Letters to Their Smartphones before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 7, 1, Article 28 (March 2023), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3580792. (bib)

Smartphones have gotten under public scrutiny due to their ostensible negative impact on usersâ well-being. Nonetheless, users and related work report positive aspects of smartphones, too. We investigated this discrepancy through the prism of the emotional user-smartphone relationship by having people write love/breakup letters to their smartphones. We gathered 82 letters -- 42 before and 40 during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a mixed nature regarding the distribution of love and breakup letters and associated emotions based on the revisited OCC-model of emotions -- with a slight shift towards the negative emotional spectrum during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we performed an extensive qualitative analysis of 819 user statements extracted from the letters, resulting in a connection of emotions to 17 smartphone features and eight themes of real-life consequences of smartphone use. We then identified eight common patterns of this connection, classified as smartphone roles. The collected letters mostly model a complex user-smartphone relationship, comprising different roles depending on users' inner and outer context. We discuss how HCI could help in shaping the complex user-smartphone relationship in future research and suggest supporting a healthy balance between users' daily life and smartphone use.