New iPad user study: Mobile web trumps app usage

The biggest take-away from the survey is summarized by Dan Grommer and Leah Goldman as:

Safari, the web browser, is the iPad's most important app. But iPad owners download, pay for, and regularly use many apps, on average.

A handful of the slides stuck out in my mind as very interesting information for those coming form the perspective of news organizations trying to figure out their mobile/tablet strategies:

First off, time spent with the device daily:

This seems to mirror research by Conde Nast's iPad study last month that found users are engaging with iPad content for extensive periods of time:

In general, print readers spend about 45 minutes with an issue each month. In contrast, readers using their iPhone and iPad mag apps spent an average of 160 minutes across all the available brands. Still, the publisher wasn’t able to determine how many issues within apps were included in the time-spent figure (for example, if a participant had six GQ app issues, the publisher couldn’t tell if a person was just looking at the August or July or some other combination of months).

While these results could be dismissed as high interest in the fascinating new toy, that will eventually die off, the Business Insider survey found that as users become more experienced with their iPads, more than 77 percent said their time usage has increased.

I wish this slide was more precise because there's so much overlap in the first three categories, but it's fascinating information none-the-less. General web browsing is a major winner throughout this survey, more than iPad apps actually.

This graph shows that, like with mobile devices, people tend to use less than 10 apps on a regular basis. Specifically, this data shows that 78.1 percent of uses use 10 or less apps on a regular basis; 40.6 use less than five apps on a regular basis.

Again, using the web browser is the preferred method of delivery for news content and a high number of users are using aggregation tools.

Perhaps Rob Curley is on to something...

1. 
   robcurley Why lvsun.com formatted for iPad, instead of building app - RT@hblodget: Most popular activity on iPad is web-browsing http://read.bi/ar8aAD 13 Nov 2010 from Twitter for iPhone

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According to this research, the iPad definitely changes users behaviors when they have access to it. For most, it becomes their preferred method of web browsing and the majority of responses show uses are using it 1-5 hours a day:

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Fellow studying mobile development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.