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. This paper presents Mobile Findex; a mobile search user interface that uses automatically computed categories to present the user with an overview of the result set. In addition, it utilizes a focus+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 non-relevant result selections, an overall significant difference in search performance was not observed.

Abstract Enormous Web search engine databases combined with short search queries result in large result sets that are often difficult to access. Result ranking works fairly well, but users need help when it fails. For these situations, we propose a filtering interface that is inspired by keyword‐in‐context (KWIC) indices. The user interface lists the most frequent keyword contexts (fKWIC). When a context is selected, the corresponding results are displayed in the result list, allowing users to concentrate on the specific context. We compared the keyword context index user interface to the rank order result listing in an experiment with 36 participants. The results show that the proposed user interface was 29% faster in finding relevant results, and the precision of the selected results was 19% higher. In addition, participants showed positive attitudes toward the system.

Long web search result lists can be hard to browse. We demonstrated experimentally, in a previous study, the usefulness of a categorization algorithm and filtering interface. However, the nature of interaction in real settings is not known from an experiment in laboratory settings. To address this problem, we provided our categorizing web search user interface to 16 users for a two month period. The interactions with the system were logged and the users' opinions were elicited with two questionnaires. The results show that categories are successfully used as part of users' search habits. They are helpful when the result ranking of the search engine fails. In those cases, the users are able to access results that locate far in the rank order list with the categories. Users can also formulate simpler queries and find needed results with the help of the categories. In addition, the categories are beneficial when more than one result is needed like in an exploratory or undirected search task.

Experienced web users have strategies for information search and re-access that are not directly supported by web browsers or search engines. We studied how prevalent these strategies are and whether even experienced users have problems with searching and re-accessing information. With this aim, we conducted a survey with 236 experienced web users. The results showed that this group has frequently used key strategies (e.g., using several browser windows in parallel) that they find important, whereas some of the strategies that have been suggested in previous studies are clearly less important for them (e.g., including URLs on a webpage). In some aspects, such as query formulation, this group resembles less experienced web users. For instance, we found that most of the respondents had misconceptions about how their search engine handles queries, as well as other problems with information search and re-access. In addition to presenting the prevalence of the strategies and rationales for their use, we present concrete designs solutions and ideas for making the key strategies also available to less experienced users.

Journal Article Findex: improving search result use through automatic filtering categories Get access Mika Käki, Mika Käki * Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Kehruukoulunkatu 1, FIN-33014 Tampere, Finland * Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 3 215 6181; fax: +358 3 215 6070. E-mail addresses:[email protected] (M. Käki), [email protected] (A. Aula). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anne Aula Anne Aula Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Kehruukoulunkatu 1, FIN-33014 Tampere, Finland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 17, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 187–206, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2005.01.001 Published: 01 March 2005 Article history Received: 24 June 2004 Revision received: 06 August 2004 Accepted: 10 January 2005 Published: 01 March 2005

Small hand-held touchpads can be used to replace stylus-based digitizing tablets when the use of a stylus is not convenient. In text entry tasks where the writing surface is held in a hand the error rate becomes a problem. The small size of strokes compared to the width of the fingertip and the additional imprecision caused by the interaction of the pad and finger movements make input very imprecise. We describe a new improved clock-face based stroke system for entering numbers with a touchpad. In a 20-session user study with 6 users we found slightly better throughput of successfully entered numbers with the proposed new system. This advantage was mainly due to lower error rate with the new system. User preference similarly slightly favored the new system over an earlier straightforward proposal based on the clock metaphor