How Do Users Search the Mobile Web with a Clustering Interface?

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomi Heimonen
Keyword(s):  
Information Needs ◽  
User Study ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Information Need ◽  
Mobile Web ◽  
Search Result ◽  
Mobile Information Access ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Mobile Information

Category-based search result organization holds promise as a means of facilitating mobile information access. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal user study that investigated how a mobile clustering interface is used to search the Web. The author describes the participants’ search behavior and discusses the benefits and limitations of category-based result access. Study results show that category-based interaction was considered situationally useful, for example when the participants had problems describing their information need or needed to retrieve a subset of results. The paper proposes design guidelines for category-based mobile search interfaces. These include improved strategies for presenting the categories in the search interface, the need to improve the categorization methods to provide more representative category structures, and accounting for the contextual aspects of mobile information needs.

Category-Based Interfaces for Mobile Search

2015 ◽  
pp. 75-104
Author(s):  
Tomi Heimonen
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Information Need ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Search Results ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
Mobile Context ◽  
The Web

One of the challenges with designing effective mobile search interfaces is how to present and explore the search results. Category-based result organization and presentation techniques have been suggested in literature as a complement to the traditional ranked result list. In the mobile context categories can facilitate information access by providing an overview of the result set, by reducing the need for keyword entry and by providing means to filter the results. This chapter includes a review of recent research on category-based interfaces for mobile search. The chapter also addresses the challenges of evaluating mobile search in situ and presents a longitudinal user study that investigated how a mobile clustering interface is used to search the Web. Results from the study show that category-based interaction can be situationally useful, for example when users have problems describing their information need or wish to retrieve a subset of results. In summary, the chapter proposes future research directions for category-based mobile search interfaces.

A basic architecture for mobile information access

1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 683-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Bönigk ◽  
Astrid Lubinski
Keyword(s):  
Information Access ◽  
Mobile Information Access ◽  
Mobile Information

Mobile information access

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Church ◽  
Barry Smyth ◽  
Paul Cotter ◽  
Keith Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Information Access ◽  
Mobile Information Access ◽  
Mobile Information

scholarly journals SchenQL: in-depth analysis of a query language for bibliographic metadata

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christin Katharina Kreutz ◽  
Michael Wolz ◽  
Jascha Knack ◽  
Benjamin Weyers ◽  
Ralf Schenkel
Keyword(s):  
Information Needs ◽  
User Study ◽  
Query Language ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Domain Experts ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Information Exploration ◽  
High Level

AbstractInformation access to bibliographic metadata needs to be uncomplicated, as users may not benefit from complex and potentially richer data that may be difficult to obtain. Sophisticated research questions including complex aggregations could be answered with complex SQL queries. However, this comes with the cost of high complexity, which requires for a high level of expertise even for trained programmers. A domain-specific query language could provide a straightforward solution to this problem. Although less generic, it can support users not familiar with query construction in the formulation of complex information needs. In this paper, we present and evaluate SchenQL, a simple and applicable query language that is accompanied by a prototypical GUI. SchenQL focuses on querying bibliographic metadata using the vocabulary of domain experts. The easy-to-learn domain-specific query language is suitable for domain experts as well as casual users while still providing the possibility to answer complex information demands. Query construction and information exploration are supported by a prototypical GUI. We present an evaluation of the complete system: different variants for executing SchenQL queries are benchmarked; interviews with domain-experts and a bipartite quantitative user study demonstrate SchenQL’s suitability and high level of users’ acceptance.

scholarly journals Mobile Findex: Facilitating Information Access in Mobile Web Search with Automatic Result Clustering

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomi Heimonen
Keyword(s):  
User Interface ◽  
Web Search ◽  
User Study ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
List Presentation ◽  
Mobile Web ◽  
Subjective Evaluations ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Screen Space

Designing an effective mobile search user interface is challenging, as interacting with the results is often complicated by the lack of available screen space and limited interaction methods. We present Mobile Findex, a mobile search user interface that uses automatically computed result clusters to provide the user with an overview of the result set. In addition, it utilizes a focus-plus-context result list presentation combined with an intuitive browsing method to aid the user in the evaluation of results. A user study with 16 participants was carried out to evaluate Mobile Findex. Subjective evaluations show that Mobile Findex was clearly preferred by the participants over the traditional ranked result list in terms of ease of finding relevant results, suitability to tasks, and perceived efficiency. While the use of categories resulted in a lower rate of nonrelevant result selections and better precision in some tasks, an overall significant difference in search performance was not observed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document