Smartphone applications (a.k.a., apps) have become indispensable in our everyday life and work. In practice, accomplishing a task on smartphones may require the user to navigate among various apps. Unlike Web pages that are inherently interconnected through hyperlinks, apps are usually isolated building blocks, and the lack of direct links between apps has compromised the efficiency of task completion and user experience. In this article, we present the first in-depth empirical study of page-level access behaviors of smartphone users based on a comprehensive dataset collected through an extensive user study. We propose a model to distinguish informational pages and transitional pages , based on which we can extract page-level inter-app navigation. Surprisingly, the transitional pages account for quite substantial time cost and manual actions when navigating from the current informational page to the desirable informational page. We reveal that developing “ tunnels ” between “isolated” apps under specific usage scenarios has a huge potential to reduce the cost of navigation. Our analysis provides some practical implications on how to improve app-navigation experience from both the operating system’s perspective and the developer’s<?brk?> perspective.

中文翻译：

---

穿越城堡隧道

智能手机应用程序（又名应用程序）已成为我们日常生活和工作中不可或缺的一部分。在实践中，在智能手机上完成一项任务可能需要用户在各种应用程序之间导航。与网页本质上通过超链接相互连接不同，应用程序通常是孤立的构建块，应用程序之间缺乏直接链接，影响了任务完成的效率和用户体验。在本文中，我们基于通过广泛的用户研究收集的综合数据集，首次对智能手机用户的页面级访问行为进行了深入的实证研究。我们提出了一个模型来区分信息页面和过渡页，据此我们可以提取页面级的应用间导航。令人惊讶的是，当从当前信息页面导航到所需信息页面时，过渡页面占了相当大的时间成本和手动操作。我们揭示了发展中的“隧道”在特定使用场景下“孤立”的应用程序之间具有巨大的降低导航成本的潜力。我们的分析为如何从操作系统的角度和开发人员的<?brk?> 角度改善应用程序导航体验提供了一些实际意义。