Today the family was around for lunch, which resulted in three iPhones in the house - mine, my husbands and my brother-in-laws. Which got me pondering if someone would be able to tell whose was who's by looking at the home screens:
What do you think? Which one is me? I'm the third one, but I'm not sure you could tell unless you knew I liked word games and travelled by train regularly. I wondered if at a basic level you could spot gender or connectedness just from home screen app selections.
I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and gathered a dozen more examples (full set embedded in the slideshow below if you are interested). I'm not sure I can deduce anything about gender/interests etc from this small set, but here are some observations:
- Most people have phone and email on the bottom (shared) row
- Most people have the settings app on their home page
- Several people wanted to share their second screen as they felt that was where their personality came through - the home screen is just the 'boring apps' they use most often
- Nobody has 'messages' (SMS/MMS) on the bottom row unless it was in a folder along with phone, Email seems a much preferred messaging platform for my sample
- Everybody has iPod (or Music for iPod users) on their home screen. Apart from me.
- We all love our connected services - Twitter and/or Facebook highly prominent for everyone. Although given my method of capturing these images this is not at all surprising!
A special mention goes to this home screen as the most categorised of them all. One page, all folders apart from a camera app:
So, in summary, I'm not sure you can tell much about people from their iPhone home screens - or rather, we all use the same basic set of apps. Would love to see some screens from non-twitter/Facebook users - but suspect there wouldn't be much difference. If you find some out there in the wild, please send them in and I'll add them to the collection and see if there is any secret psychology out there!
4 comments:
Wonder why some screenshots are diff sizes? Surely all made in same way? Diff handsets?
Think it was just the different routes people used to send me the pictures - facebook, twitter, email etc. They all change the size in their own special ways!
Crazy creative analysis Katie. Love it! Would be really interesting if you could get some proper large scale data crunching going on.
There must be so much social data mining & analysis possible with smart phones these days - one of my favs is http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/#user-katiepiatt although my wife and I are always comparing how many texts we send each other using the iphone conversation layout. Can't beat a bit of basic visual interpretation!
Really- Great blog of iphone and ipad touch screen.iPhone Screen
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