Leveraging attention scarcity to improve the overall user experience of Cloud services

Abstract

Applications for mobile devices are increasingly relying on Cloud services to provide content and offload data processing tasks. Traditionally, web-based systems have been optimised to improve response time. Touch sensitive screens and the various sensors of mobile devices allow for better instrumentation, enabling providers to obtain more honest signals on how users utilise a service and learn about their behaviours. This work introduces an architecture that explores honest signals to determine a few user behaviours, e.g. the tendency to perform multiple tasks at a time, change focus, and expect fast response from a service. The architecture relies on a novel resource management strategy that considers such behaviours to prioritise service requests from users who demand fast response from a service. By comparing the proposed strategy with one that does not consider the signals, we show that the experience of users who demand faster response time can be improved without degrading the quality of service of those who often perform multiple activities. The proposed strategy also brings benefits to service providers as no additional resources are necessary to enhance overall user experience, which we modelled using Prospect Theory. © 2013 IEEE.