An android toolkit for supporting field studies on mobile devices

Evaluating mobile user interfaces in the field is a time-consuming and cumbersome task. In order to figure out how users interact with mobile apps or devices over an extended period of time, an automated logging of device usage and context information is necessary. In this paper, we present an Android app called automate toolkit for logging such data across arbitrary apps in a convenient and customizable way. It allows to trace usage information like visited screens and performed gestures as well as information about the context of use like device orientation and light conditions. The data is stored on the device for further analysis with statistical software. We made the toolkit available as open source software in order to support developers, designers and researchers in conducting field studies on Android devices.