Towards better understanding of app transitions in mobile search

This paper focused on the transitions among APPs during mobile search by conducting a user experiment with 30 participants in fifteen days. Using the data collected through mobile logs, structured diary and interviews, we performed a quantitative and qualitative study on investigating the participants’ APP usages in their search sessions, and discussed the causes of APP transitions. Our results identified four patterns of transitions in mobile searches, and provided the probabilities of transitions during query submission, including self-transition. The causes of APP-APP transition were mainly out of the feedback of search results, the interruption while searching and follow-up actions triggered by searching