User trial of the ScreenLife personal tracking application

ScreenLife is a personal tracking application developed at the University of Glasgow. It enables users to view data about how long they spend using digital devices such as laptops, mobile phones and tablets. ScreenLife has two general components: a logger that monitors and records when a device is in use, and an interface that provides users with a visual presentation of the logged data. We implemented ScreenLife loggers for four platforms: iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows (meaning it will work on iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Android tablets, Mac computers, and Windows computers). The visual interface can be viewed using the ScreenLife iOS or Android app, or on a web browser on any platform. We conducted a user trial of ScreenLife in mid 2015. We recruited 21 participants and asked them to install the application on their digital devices. The participants had a combined total of 48 devices. The participants were required to keep the application installed for 28 days or more, but were told they could look at the interface as much or little as they want. The ScreenLife dataset consists of: information collected from the ScreenLife loggers; information about when the users accessed the interface; qualitative data from user interviews conducted at the end of the trial; screenshots of the application.