Where do you 'use it'? Apparently, bed / couch / kitchen are the most favourite places to use a tablet

Google published a new qualitative research on user behavior and tablets. Some of the results are more than expected. More or less, a tablet is a device for passive consumption of content. People on it mostly dealt with personal issues, playd games and read e-mails. More surprising, however, is that the number of people who use the tablet in bed equaled number of people using the tablet on the couch. Almost half of respondents also used tablets in the kitchen.

Tablet is often a bit of a supplementary activity made possible by the fact that people nowadays can deal with multiple screens at once. The most common shared activity is watching television. Together, these two activities can be handled by more than 60 percent respondents. In 40 percent, respondents were tracking the tablet and their additional activity would be eating and drinking, 27 percent also cooking. Tablets are not so much an escape from boredom from television, but often used to improve the experience of watching TV, perhaps searching for information related to the currently running program. The research, however, also worked out that the TV is often used as "background noise" while people were doing on the tablet completely unrelated activities such as checking email.

Google is obviously interested in the level of online purchases from tablets. According to the study, while 58 percent of users took some "pre-buy survey" on their mobile devices, but many of them then decided to complete the purchase on laptops or desktop computers. Activities associated with the acquisition were at 30 percent more common on devices other than tablets and shops (17 percent). The reasons mentioned included lack of stored credentials for e-shops or difficulty completing payment information on the touch screen tablets.

One of the research notes thus: "It is important to provide uninterrupted experience across all devices, users and to be able to activity started on one of your devices simply continue on another." Fulfilling this mission is a way for consumer electronics manufacturer and creator of websites and applications one of the most important tasks that have the potential to raise the level of e-commerce.

Sources: research.google.com ( Understanding Tablet Use: A Multi-Method Exploration )