The Tale of a Complicated Relationship: Insights from Users' Love/Breakup Letters to Their Smartphones before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since I mostly write official letters related to work, study and other non-friendly stuff, it is a bit unusual for me to write to you.

Fig. 1. We asked participants to write a love or breakup letter to their smartphone to investigate their emotional bond.

Smartphones have gotten under public scrutiny due to their ostensible negative impact on users' 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.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Smartphones; Human computer interaction (HCI).