Mobile HCI IS 698/800

Spring 2013Shaun Kane

Week 5: Mobile search/info seeking

2

Today

• App presentation: Jonathan on Project Glass

• Paper presentations (Adam, Peter, Alla)

• Assignment 1 presentations

• Time permitting: interview activity

3

Project GlassJonathan Pautsch

A Diary Study of Mobile Information NeedsCHI 2008Presented by: Adam Halem

Authors Backgrounds• Timothy Sohn: PHD Comp Science from UC San Diego. Currently has 24

publications from 2002-2012. Works at Google.

• Kevin A. Li: PHD Comp Science from UC San Diego. Currently has 9 publications from 2005-2011. Works at AT&T Research Labs.

• William G. Griswold: PHD Comp Sciencefrom U of Washington. Currently has 104 publications from 1987-2012. Works in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at UC San Diego.

• James D. Hollan: PHD from U of Florida in Cognitive Psychology as well as a postdoctoral fellowship in artificial intelligence at Stanford. Currently has 66 publications from 1985-2012. Is a professor at UC San Diego as well as Director of Human-Computer Interaction lab at UCSD.

Intro to the Study• Understand mobile information needs and associated

interaction challenges.• Two week study to better understand these mobile

information needs.• Reference to Kamvar and Baluja (Researchers at Google) 1

million Google search queries were analyzed and determined people had different uses for mobile searches VS desktop searches.

Study Procedure• 20 Participants (10 male, 10 female) ages 19-58. Required to

have mobile phones and text messaging experience• Diary entry style.• Participants recorded entries when information needs arose.• At the end of the day participants logged into a website and

answered 6 questions about their diary entries.• Conduct intro, mid-study, and final interviews.

6 End of the Day Questions

1. Where were you?2. What were you doing?3. What was your information need?4. I addressed the need (At the time, later, Not at all)5. If you attempted to address the need, how did you do so? If

you didn’t make an attempt, why didn’t you?6. Could you have addressed your need by looking at your

personal data (e.g. email, calendar, web browsing history, char history , or other)

QUESTION: Do you feel that this study format is effective?What issues could arise from this type of study?

Participant Incentives• Could earn a maximum of $80.

• $3/day with $10 bonus for 12 our of 15 days participated.• $10 for both the in person intro interview and final interview.• $5 for mid-study phone interview.

Taxonomy of Information Needs

Breakdown of information needs by categories. Examples for each category are from real diary entries. Categories are sorted based on their frequency in our study.

When Information Needs were Addressed

Pie chart of diary entry percentages for whenparticipants addressed their information need.

How Needs Were Addressed

Breakdown of how needs were addressed at the time they arose across all diary entries

Why Needs Were Not Addressed

Reasons why needs were not addressed. Percentageof entries for each category.

Information Needs Determined by Context

Design Implications from Study• Mobile tech should allow current tasks to address needs at

later more convenient times.• Context plays a huge role and information needs should be

triggered by context.• Personal data obtained through web based services of their

personal devices would allow for a seamless connection between a personal source and public resource when addressing information needs.

• QUESTION: Today, what features/apps have been added to mobile phones that address the common information needs of people that may not have been around during this study (2008)?

Fancy a drink in Canary Warf?

Peter Cox

The Study

Purpose:

Examination of location-based searches and needs.

Method:12 participants, 12 days, mobile phones, London area.

Log queries/location with web diary, post-interviews.

Key Findings:1. Most location based-searches have social context.

2. Folks like to stick to routine routes and places.

The Authors

Alia Amin: CWI, User Experience

Sian Townsend: Google UK, User Experience

J.V. Ossenbruggen: CWI, Senior Researcher

Lynda Hardman: CWI, Head Researcher

Google Mobile Search

Words/query: 2.7 for PDAs (Desktop was 2.35)

Popular Searches - Mobile: porn, free ringtones, internet services (like Gmail, Ebay), entertainment, games...

Popular Searches - Desktop: Commerce, travel, employment, people, places...

Local services accounted for ~15%

Further Reading

Kamvar, M., & Baluja, S. (2006, April). A large scale study of wireless search behavior: Google mobile search. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 701-709). ACM.

.Spink, A., Jansen, B., Wolfram, D., Saracevic, T. 2002. From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web search changes. IEEE Computer Vol. 35 No.3 pp. 107-10

Understanding the Intent Behind Mobile Information Need

Karen Church et al.

Understanding the Intent Behind Mobile Information Need

Resumen de Karen Church Actual Research Scientist en Telefonica I+D

Anterior Associate Researcher en Telefonica I+D

PhD Researcher en University College Dublin

Software Engineering Intern (Mobile) en Google

ver todo

Educación University College Dublin

Institude of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB)

Barry Smyth

Name and Title: Barry Smyth Position: Digital Professor of Computer SciencePhone: +353 1 7162473Email: Personal Website: http://barry.smyth.ucd.ie

Mobile users are likely to be interested in locating different types of content on-the-go. The mobile space presents a number of key challenges, in particular, changing contexts such as location, time, activity and social interactions are likely to impact on the types of information needs that arise. In order to understand mobile users’ needs for mobile services Church and her team carried out a four-week diary study of mobile information needs, looking in particular at the goal/intent behind mobile information needs, the topics users are interested in and the impact of mobile contexts such as location and time on user needs.Mobile Internet usage increased, impressive 85.9% of iPhone users in the US ventured online during the first three months of use. Mobile search has become a popular way to locate content on the Mobile Internet, especially as off-portal content continues to grow.

Church and her team believe that mobile search will differ from Web search, not just because of the devices but also because people’s information needs differ when mobile. They are likely to be interested in locating different types of content , and the goal of this study is to understand the intent behind information needs and how those information needs change based on context.They compare user needs while at homeat work and while on-the-go.The findings indicate that when users are mobile there is aclear location and temporal dependency in their informationneeds. When they examined user goals, they found that traditional Web taxonomies such as navigational and transactional needs were non-existent among the diary entries, thus requiring the addition of two new taxonomies that capture the unique constraints of mobility.

Understanding Mobile Information Needs There are two general approaches to understanding information needs. Fist approach examineshow they search for information onlineandwhat users search for The second approach examineswhy users search for information

how users search for information online?In 2005 Church et al. analyzed the search habits of approximately50,000 mobile European users, and their usage of more than 30 different mobile search engines. Church et al. reported an average of approximately 2.1 terms length per query, and 7.9 characters per query for Google Mobile what users search for?Church et al. highlighted the prevalence of Adult content among the targets of mobile searchers; 50% of the top mobile search queries related to adult content.

Analyzing Mobile Search Behavior Also, Church et al. compared search (looking for something specific) and browsing (casual looking through material generally with nothing specific in mind) in her study and her findings were that at the beginning of era of the mobile internet 94%of mobile sessions devoted to browsing only. Work by Taylor et al. focuses at why mobile subscribers access information on the Mobile Internet. The most frequent motivation for accessing information online via a mobile phone is awareness, a motivation usually satisfied with status checking behavior. The authors define awareness as the desire to stay current, to keep oneself informed in general. e.g.: scanning email and checking news sites. While status checking involves checking dynamic information like weather, news or sports scores during a game, etc..

Analyzing Search IntentThe second approach to understanding information needs is to examinewhy users search, what are their goals/intent. In a current study Church et al. uses Broder taxonomy of Web search. There are 3 classes of Web queries according to their intent: (1) Navigational, (2) Informational and (3) Transactional. Navigational queries are google, hotmail, etc.,Informational queries are general queries in which the goal is to learn more about a topic or get an answer to a question, etc. Transactional queries are those intended to perform some web-mediated activity (playing games, downloading music, interacting with some online service)

Church et al. uses Jansen et al. data from analyzing 5 million queries of intent of Web search queries, and it indicated that 80% of Web queries were informational in nature10% navigational 10% transactional. To date, this is an area that has not yet been examined within the mobile search space. However, it is likely that given the high prevalence of adult and multimedia content on the mobile Internet that the volume of transactional queries will be quite high.

Diary Studies were conducted to understand the impact that time and location will have on information needs, and to gain some insights into what makes the mobile space unique.Diary studies are a longitudinal method which allows self-recording of specific aspects of behavior, usually using a small diary or notebook. Diary studies are useful because they can help capture data in environments which would normally be difficult for an observer, and typically asks a user to record the date and time of an event, the user’s location or context, information about the event, etc.

METHODOLOGYParticipantsTwenty participants took part in this study during one month; all of them owned a mobile phone and have experience with phone calls and SMS text messaging. Most of them did not access the Mobile Internet frequently due to high cost, speed, input difficulties.Participants were asked to keep a diary of all their information needs while they were at home, at work or on-the-go.

Diagram 13 classes of intent: navigational, informational and transactional Church et al. found a very different distribution of intent among our diary entries, suggesting the need for two new categories — geographical and personal informational needs(PIM) Geographical needs are focused on the goal of finding directions, address, etc..Personal informational needs focused on the goal of obtaining information about a topic (“How much will a taxi to Castleknock cost?”) Overall information needs are split between Informational 64%, Geographical 75%, and Personal Information Man-agement (PIM)65%

CONCLUSIONS

Church et al. found that most of the diary entries were generated when users where away from their familiar contexts. The results also highlighted the importance of personal information management type needs.Topic analysis confirmed that the two most popular topics were local services and travel & commuting.Diary study has also highlighted that mobile needs differ significantly from general Web needs. The key factor that attributes to this difference is that mobile users are on-the move and as such are interested in locating different types of content.

REFERENCES1. R. Baeza-Yates, G. Dupret, and J. Velasco. A study ofmobile search queries in Japan. InQuery Log Analysisat WWW 2007, 2007.2. J. Brandt, N. Weiss, and S. R. Klemmer. txt 4 l8r:lowering the burden for diary studies under mobileconditions. InProceedings of CHI ’07 extendedabstracts, pages 2303–2308. ACM, 2007.3. A. Broder. A taxonomy of web search.SIGIR Forum

36(2):3–10, 2002.4. K. Church, K. Bradley, P. Cotter, and B. Smyth. A largescale study of european mobile search behaviour. InMobile HCI ’08: Proceedings of the 10th InternationalSymposium on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction,pages 13–22. ACM, 2008.5. K. Church and B. Smyth. Understanding mobileinformation needs. InMobile HCI ’08: Proceedings ofthe 10th International Symposium on MobileHuman-Computer Interaction

36(2):3–10, 2002.4. K. Church, K. Bradley, P. Cotter, and B. Smyth. A largescale study of european mobile search behaviour. InMobile HCI ’08: Proceedings of the 10th InternationalSymposium on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction,pages 13–22. ACM, 2008.5. K. Church and B. Smyth. Understanding mobileinformation needs. InMobile HCI ’08: Proceedings ofthe 10th International Symposium on MobileHuman-Computer Interaction

ACM Transactions onthe Web, 1(1):4, 2007.8. M. Colbert. A diary study of rendezvousing:implications for position-aware computing andcommunications for the general public. InGROUP ’01:Proceedings of the 2001 International ACMSIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work,pages 15–23. ACM, 2001.9. S. Consolvo and M. Walker. Using the experiencesampling method to evaluate ubicomp applications.IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2(2):24–31, 2003.10. R. Grinter and M. Eldridge. Wan2tlk?: everyday textmessaging. InProceedings of CHI’03, pages 441–448.ACM, 2003.

5-minute break

41

A1 presentations

• 5 minutes max (fewer is better!)