AI technologies that sense student attention and emotions to enable more personalised teaching interventions are increasingly promoted, but raise pressing questions about student learning, wellbeing, and ethics. In particular, students’ perspectives about AI sensing-intervention in learning are often overlooked. We conducted an online mixed-method experiment with Australian university students (N=132), presenting video scenarios varying by whether sensing was used (in-use vs. not-in-use), sensing modality (gaze-based attention detection vs. facial-based emotion detection), and intervention (by digital device vs. teacher). Participants also completed pairwise ranking tasks to prioritise six core ethical concerns. Findings revealed that students valued targeted intervention but responded negatively to AI monitoring, regardless of sensing methods. Students preferred system-generated hints over teacher-initiated assistance, citing learning agency and social embarrassment concerns. Students’ ethical considerations prioritised autonomy and privacy, followed by transparency, accuracy, fairness, and learning beneficence. We advocate designing customisable, social-sensitive, non-intrusive systems that preserve student control, agency, and well-being.

Adopting AI in multi-stakeholder contexts often involves complex ethical challenges, particularly when decision-makers are not directly impacted by the technology. Ethical challenges arise not only from the design of the AI technology but also from social factors in its development and deployment which may harm disempowered stakeholders. This paper examines how stakeholder dynamics in AI adoption may help to create or mitigate such harm, using a case study of AI-based student monitoring in K-12 education. These systems analyse students’ emotions, concentration, and classroom performance to inform teaching. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders: parents, school representatives, and developers. Our findings identify three key social factors that may create ethical problems in decision-making: limited representation of students’ perspectives during design and adoption; developers’ compromises and pragmatism under organisational pressure; and school governors’ limited technological literacy and failure of ‘due diligence’. These factors arise from power imbalances related to knowledge and authority that may weaken accountability mechanisms for governing AI in Education (AIEd) adoption. We propose addressing these imbalances through improving the AI ethics literacy of key stakeholders to ensure effective oversight and informed decision-making. This work contributes an empirical understanding of how real-world power relations shape ethical vulnerabilities in AIEd adoption. It extends HCI and AI ethics research by revealing how stakeholder asymmetries can marginalise affected users and constrain the practical application of ethical design principles. These insights offer guidance for more inclusive and accountable AI governance and provide insights relevant to other multi-stakeholder AI contexts. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centred computing -> Empirical studies in HCI; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Migrants moving across national boundaries are experiencing a transition—one that requires them to readapt and reestablish themselves in new information environments. In experiencing a transition, migrants need information on the process of the move and on life in their new country. Navigating new information environments can prove difficult. Usually, that information will be structured and presented differently than ‘at home’: migrants need to adapt to a whole new digital environment, and often do so while retaining informational ties to home. Language, bureaucratic, and emotional barriers make it difficult for migrants to find the information they need in their new environment; and instead push them to rely on familiar information sources from their home countries that contain less specific and relevant information. However, migrants also bring their unique information experiences and habits to their new digital environments. The exposure to multiple digital environments can be a strength and better equip migrants to deal with different types of information. This paper examines both the barriers migrants face and the skills they use to navigate new information landscapes. It makes a case for considering migrants as a specific user group for many information tools and resources, when user testing, and makes suggestions for further research that can be done to support and learn from migrants. Migrants are an under-studied and under-considered group in the CHIIR community, and this paper is a call to action to address that gap.

Users formulate search queries that reflect an information need. Those queries are then submitted to a search service in the expectation that the retrieved results will allow the user to complete an external task, and align with their broader information context.

AI's integration into education promises to equip teachers with data-driven insights and intervene in student learning. Despite the intended advancements, there is a lack of understanding of interactions and emerging dynamics in classrooms where various stakeholders including teachers, students, and AI, collaborate. This paper aims to understand how students perceive the implications of AI in Education (AIEd) in terms of classroom collaborative dynamics, especially AI used to observe students and notify teachers to provide targeted help. Using the story completion method, we analyzed narratives from 65 participants, highlighting three challenges: AI decontextualizing of the educational context; AI-teacher cooperation with bias concerns and power disparities; AI's impact on student behavior that further challenges AI's effectiveness. We argue that for effective and ethical AI-facilitated cooperative education, future AIEd design must factor in the situated nature of implementation. Designers must consider the broader nuances of the education context, impacts on multiple stakeholders, dynamics involving these stakeholders, and the interplay among potential consequences for AI systems and stakeholders. It is crucial to understand the values in the situated context, the capacity and limitations of both AI and human for effective cooperation, and any implications to the relevant ecosystem.

In a world where misinformation is abundant, and conspiracy theorists urge others to 'do their own research’, how do people use evidence in online discussions? What types of evidence do they provide, and for what purpose? Decades of human information interaction research has focused on making it easy to share and discuss information online; and decades of information literacy research have examined how to promote critical thinking and evaluation. However, there is a lack both of systematic analyses of evidence use in online discussions, and the ways community norms affect use of evidence in those discussions. We present a mixed methods analysis of the use of three formats of external evidence (images, links, and direct quotation by using blockquotes) across three Reddit communities with very different norms. One focuses on promoting conspiracy theories, another on debunking them, and a third on personal view change. We investigate the use of these evidence formats within and between communities to understand how evidence is used in different kinds of conversation. Our findings support the design of online information tools that promote good evidentiary practice.

Qualitative research is essential for how people interact with information and informing the design of interactive information retrieval systems. However, it is often challenging to do well. There are a plethora of possible approaches, often complementary but sometimes at odds with each other and combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to data collection adds further complexity. In this tutorial, focusing on qualitative data collection approaches, we will provide attendees with a comprehensive toolkit of CHIIR-relevant qualitative methods, including interviews and both naturalistic and ‘in the wild’ observations. We will also support development of an agile skillset so attendees can adopt or adapt qualitative approaches to meet their research aims. We will cover a core of flexible, proven and rigorous practice that will provide a thorough grounding in how to plan and conduct high-quality rigorous research. The tutorial leaders come from different backgrounds and can provide insight into how to use qualitative methods for attendees from all disciplinary origins. On completion of the tutorial, you will be able to plan and conduct rigorous qualitative investigations into how people interact with information, with potential to result in high-impact information interaction research.

Information seekers often want 'something just like this', an information object (song, book, movie) like one they already know about. This approach is the premise of many modern recommender systems, which ask information seekers for examples of things they like in order to return similar things. This type of information seeking, though, is not particularly well supported by search engines, partly because the ways in which objects can be alike are multifaceted and difficult to articulate, partly because the analogue might emerge in the process of information seeking. This approach to information seeking has been touched on repeatedly in information science literature but not examined in detail. In this paper, we present a pair of studies that explore both how people seek information using analogues online and the ways in which information objects might be alike. Our results offer a novel understanding of a previously underexplored but common behaviour, addressing how analogues are identified, how they are used in information seeking, and the ways in which objects can be analogous from an information seeker's perspective. Our work can support the development of recommender systems, conversational search approaches, and digital interfaces that support this common but little-examined type of information seeking.

Measurement is a core tool for improving information interaction. What is measured and how it is measured influences how we perceive the efficacy of retrieval and other interactions. While some measures have become ubiquitous, such as precision and recall, there are many other facets of information interaction we either immature, weakly accepted or only used occasionally. This workshop seeks to develop our metrics for information interaction and retrieval, finding novel measures, or innovative adaptations of existing measures, to create a better experimental toolset to improve our understanding of information interaction, and help develop more effective systems and interactions that support it.

Qualitative research is a fundamental part of investigating information interactions, but is often challenging to do well. There are contesting theories and approaches, and combining quantitative and qualitative work adds further complexity to qualitative research. In this tutorial, we provide attendees with a comprehensive toolkit of qualitative methods. We will cover a core of flexible, proven and rigorous practice that will give even a novice a thorough grounding in the decisions and approaches to develop high-quality rigorous research. The tutorial leaders come from different backgrounds, and can provide insight into how to adopt qualitative methods whatever your own disciplinary origins. On completion of the tutorial, you will be able to design and execute sound qualitative investigations that lead to high-impact information interaction research.

Conference authorship, attendance and presentation is a key measure of quality in the HCI academic, yet we know conferences are not equally accessible for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. In this paper we examine two axes of diversity: gender, and geographic location (of both authors and conferences) and examine how they affect participation at major HCI conferences. Diversity in a group is associated with better outcomes from its work, and HCI has made numerous contributions to increasing representation in other communities. Reflecting on our own situation can produce recommendations for the planning of future HCI conferences, and identify challenges of representation that the HCI community should endeavor to address.

Online misinformation is a fiendish problem. Demonstrably false information propagates faster and more widely than truth and this has heralded a technological arms race. One possible mechanism for addressing misinformation is social: there is evidence seeing misinformation being challenged can ‘inoculate’ a reader against it. To date, no research has examined how discussions sparked by misinformation play out; What are the different ways in which people reply to posts containing misinformation? How does the discussion flow in each case? Are there differences between platforms? We address these questions through an inductive qualitative analysis of discussion threads on three public discussion platforms (Twitter, YouTube and two news sites) and on three topics (COVID, Brexit and climate change). We present a classification scheme of types of replies to misinformation, and show that replies show different patterns between platforms. Knowing how people reply to posts that contain misinformation enriches our knowledge of ‘human misinformation interaction,’ and provides an understanding of how socio-technical factors in platform design can reduce the risk of misinformation spreading.

Understanding complex information behaviour in an empirical, ecologically valid way is difficult at the best of times. It verges on impossible with artificial environments and tightly constrained tasks such as those found in usability labs. Similarly artificial measures of user satisfaction that are readily available from test collections are unlikely to provoke revolutionary insights. The alternative is to study user behaviour in the wild, however this involves complex trade-offs between method, precision, privacy, interpretation and generalizability. This tutorial addresses both qualitative and quantitative methods, and how to balance the risks of studying unpredictable but fully human behaviour, particularly during and following a pandemic.

Conducting studies involving actual users is a recurring challenge in information retrieval. In this tutorial we will address the main strategic and tactical choices for engaging with, designing and executing user studies, considering both evaluation and formative investigation. The tension between reproducibility and ensuring natural user behaviour will be a recurring focus, seeking to help individual researchers make an intentional and well-argued choice for their research. The presenters have over fifty years of combined experience working in interactive information retrieval, and information interaction in general.

Homesickness, which refers to feelings of distress caused by separation from home, is prevalent among university-aged students. Chronic homesickness can exacerbate mood problems, erode academic performance and lead to dropout from school. The present research examines how students use digital technologies to resolve the experience of missing home. Qualitative interviews and diaries with 50 students at major Australian universities revealed that technologies play a significant role in alleviating homesickness. Specifically, students use technologies to acquire social contact, find help and support, build co-presence to recreate their home, connect with culture, experience distant places, and regulate emotions. However, the use of technology sometimes led to increased emotional labour, frequent exposure to homesickness triggers, and heightened perceptions of distance. We conclude by discussing possible design implications for new technologies that allow students to alleviate homesickness by experiencing their home from afar.

If reading was simply ingesting information, it would not matter what format that information arrived in-whether it be digital, poor quality newsprint, or the most beautiful hardback book. We do make choices about our reading, though, based on other factors than informational content. Some of these have been discussed in the literature, including convenience, preferences between paper and screen, and acquisition preferences. In this paper, we discuss books and reading as a performance. We examine the visual and cultural elements of books that influence the decisions we make about privacy or performance. We use these reflections to suggest a new form of information interaction, and make suggestions for a future program of research to support this new interaction.

Reading is not simply a solitary activity. It occurs in a social context, which influences both a reader's choices about what to read, and their understanding about what they read. Digitally, direct personal communication and online discussions are two examples of social reading activity. However, our understanding of social reading is still young: we know some elements of the activity, but we lack a comprehensive picture of its behavioural elements and how they interact. This study aims to bridge that existing gap.

Abstract Aged care monitoring devices (ACMDs) enable older adults to live independently at home. But to do so, ACMDs collect and share older adults’ personal information with others, potentially raising privacy concerns. This paper presents a detailed account of the different privacy problems in ACMDs that concern older adults. We report findings from interviews and a focus group conducted with older adults who are ageing in place. Using Daniel Solove’s privacy taxonomy to categorize privacy concerns, our analysis suggests that older adults are concerned about the potential for ACMDs to give rise to six problems: surveillance, secondary use of data, breach of confidentiality, disclosure, decisional interference and disturbing others. Other findings indicate that participants are worried about their ability to impose control over collection and management of their personal details and are willing to only accept privacy trade-offs during emergencies. We provide recommendations for ACMD developers and future directions to address findings from this research.

Metrics of human behaviour and effort lie at the heart of improving information interaction and retrieval. However, while some measurements have become predominant, such as precision and recall, there are many elements of information interaction where either measures have yet to be created, accepted, or widely used. This workshop seeks to tease out these areas, finding novel measures, or novel uses of existing measures, to create better experimental tools to improve our understanding of information interaction, and help develop better systems to support it.

Understanding complex information behaviour in an empirical, ecologically valid way is difficult at the best of times. It verges on impossible with artificial environments and tightly constrained tasks such as those found in usability labs. Similarly, artificial measures of user satisfaction that are readily available from test collections are unlikely to provoke revolutionary insights. The alternative is to study user behaviour in the wild, however this involves complex trade-offs between method, precision, privacy, interpretation and generalizability. This tutorial addresses both qualitative and quantitative methods, and how to balance the risks of studying unpredictable but fully human behaviour.

While computers causing chaos is a common social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order-and the systems we create with it-support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks. We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offer what we term 'bounded chaos', and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interfaces

Information interactions are strongly affected by the place where they occur. Specific locations are often associated with searches on particular topics, and individual users perform different tasks in habituated places. A classic example of habituated space is the commuter who regularly reads the news on the train. This paper investigates these associations through four user studies that examine different uses of place in information interaction. Through this, we reveal the ways in which the location of information interactions makes them effective or ineffective. This extends our interpretation of the role of place in information interaction beyond established foci such as location-based search.

Libraries increasingly offer much of their collection online, rendering it invisible or unavailable to readers who, for reasons of information experience, prefer to browse the shelves. Although the evidence that shelf browsing is an important part of information behavior is increasing, information browsing as a behavior is somewhat of a black box (in contrast to web browsing, which is relatively well understood). It seems likely from early work that browsing is not, in fact, a monolithic behavior, but rather a set of behaviors and goals. The typologies presented in these works, however, are of a too high level to offer much insight into what support is needed for successful online browsing. In contrast, a recent spate of speculative browsing technologies meet some browsing needs, but offer little theoretical understanding of how systems support browsing. The major contribution of this article is a new typology of library browsing behavior based on recent observations of browsing behavior in libraries. The secondary contribution is an understanding of the interface features that would support these types of information browsers in an online environment.

HCI is increasingly exploring how temperature can be used as an interaction modality. One challenge is that temperature changes are perceived over the course of seconds. This can be attributed to both the slow response time of skin thermoreceptors and the latency of the technology used to heat and cool the skin. For this reason, thermal cues are typically used to communicate single states, such as an emotion, and then there is a pause of tens of seconds to allow the skin to re-adapt to a neutral temperature before sending another signal. In contrast, this paper presents the first experimental demonstration that continuous temperature changes can guide behaviour: significantly improving performance in a 2D maze navigation task, without having to return to a neutral state before a new signal is sent. We discuss how continuous thermal feedback may be used for real world navigational tasks.

Previous research has investigated whether temperature can augment a range of media including music, images and video. We describe the first experiment to investigate whether temperature can augment emotion conveyed by text messages. A challenge in prior work has been ensuring users can discern different thermal signals. We present an improved technique for thermal feedback that uses an array of three thermal stimulators. We demonstrate that the Thermal Array Display (TAD) increases users' ability to identify temperatures within a narrower range, compared to using a single thermal stimulator. While text messages dominate valence in the absence of context for temperature, the TAD consistently conveys arousal, and can enhance arousal of text messages, especially those that are emotionally neutral. We discuss potential applications of augmenting text with temperature.

A key problem in the field of search interfaces is dyslexic users interaction with the UI. Dyslexia is a widespread specific learning difficult (SpLD) (10% of any population is estimated to have this cognitive disability) which is under researched in the field of information retrieval. The focus here is an analysis of the User Interface (UI) for search, using visual analytical methods on eye tracking data to examine the difference between control and dyslexic searchers. We use a number of visual analytic methods including path similarity analysis (PSA) and clustering of time intervals to demonstrate both similarities and differences between the user groups. Observations of videos are used to augment the visualizations. Results demonstrate a clear difference between the user groups, and a clear memory effect on the user of search interfaces is shown -- this is a key contribution of this paper. We examine the results using of theories of dyslexia, contributing also to the field of dyslexia and search.

This paper investigates the life of books on physical library shelves. Most existing data on the use of library books uses logs to quantify loans, or user interviews to obtain insights into their use. We deploy a new specialised technique, photographing library shelves systematically over a week-long period, and noting the changes to the positioning of individual books, and each shelf as a whole. Through this indirect observation, we demonstrate the use of shelved books within, rather than on leaving, the library. We reveal the first insight into within-library book use, and demonstrate that in-library use appears to be more common and over a longer period than previous research suggests.

One of the major failings of ebook collections is the lack of readily available browsing mechanisms particularly in academic libraries. This stands in sharp contrast to the library shelves, and is bemoaned by readers as a reason to avoid the use of ebooks. Nonetheless earlier work has identified limited ebook co-borrowing; in this paper we address the relationships between these ebooks with a view to understanding how readers accessed them in a single session.

What does it mean for a reader to borrow an ebook? Ebook technology means that borrowing can take different forms, for example printing and reading. We do not know, though, which of these options readers actually use. Ebook technology generates logs that allow us to understand ebook borrowing patterns over time, both by individual readers and in aggregate. Despite the ready availability of ebook logs, this area remains under-researched. In this paper we present an exploratory log analysis of ebook borrowing, comparing printing and reading, discovery patterns, single- and multiple-book sessions and identifying specific borrowing patterns.

Tools for automatic subject assignment help deal with scale and sustainability in creating and enriching metadata, establishing more connections across and between resources and enhancing consistency. Although some software vendors and experimental researchers claim the tools can replace manual subject indexing, hard scientific evidence of their performance in operating information environments is scarce. A major reason for this is that research is usually conducted in laboratory conditions, excluding the complexities of real‐life systems and situations. The article reviews and discusses issues with existing evaluation approaches such as problems of aboutness and relevance assessments, implying the need to use more than a single “gold standard” method when evaluating indexing and retrieval, and proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework. The framework is informed by a systematic review of the literature on evaluation approaches: evaluating indexing quality directly through assessment by an evaluator or through comparison with a gold standard, evaluating the quality of computer‐assisted indexing directly in the context of an indexing workflow, and evaluating indexing quality indirectly through analyzing retrieval performance.

The world is faced with a growing number of people who live with chronic medical conditions. There have been numerous digital interventions into personal management of these diseases in recent years, yet gaps remain in the HCI literature. In particular, we lack a systematic understanding of user requirements in tools that support independent management while away from external influences. This paper presents a first investigation into low-intervention support for self-management. A mobile application enabled individuals to capture contextual information related to their health in the form of photographs. Through a month-long user study, we identify four management trends amongst our participants and describe their influence on mobile application adoption.

Mobile reading is becoming evermore popular with the introduction of eInk devices such as the Kindle, as well as the many reading applications available on slate PCs and cellular handsets. The portable nature and large storage capacity of these modern mobile devices is making reading a more technology orientated activity. One aspect of mobile reading that has been given surprisingly little attention is collective reading - which is a common activity with paper documents. We investigate the support of group reading using slate PCs, focussing on collective annotation. In the past, desktop PCs have proved inferior in many ways for reading, when compared to paper. Notably, user evaluations of our new system, BuddyBooks, demonstrate that the slate PC form factor can, in contrast, provide advantages for group reading. While annotation practices change with the new format, coordinating within the group can be improved when touch-interaction is carefully exploited.

Attentive reading is a complex and cognitively demanding task that uses note-taking and annotation to support the reader’s interpretation of the document. When reading on paper, extensive use of highlighting and other activities are conducted to support attentive reading, but this rich behaviour is not used with digital documents. Many users therefore print digital documents and then interact with them in physical form. This paper presents the “Digital Reading Desk,” an enhanced digital reading environment that provides support for attentive reading, providing a large working space for notes that mimics the use of desk space in a conventional physical environment. The Reading Desk uses a single tool to support both annotation and bookmarking, simplifying both the user’s learning of the system and their use of tools. Evaluation of the Reading Desk indicates preference for it, as well as considerable behavioural differences between our approach and traditional digital reading tools.

Reading is increasingly being performed interactively on-screen; for instance, new novels are now routinely released in electronic format for viewing on PCs and mobile devices. Unfortunately, on-screen reading loses many of the natural features of conventional physical media, such as the ability to annotate, slip in bookmarks, turn page corners, and so on. How best should these features be represented electronically? Can computerized representations give benefits that excel the conventional benefits of paper? We describe the design and implementation of a novel reading system that mimics key properties of paper and surpasses them by incorporating digital techniques. A comparative user study evaluating the system confirmed the effectiveness of the features and the value of the system as a whole.

Abstract This article reports on a longitudinal study of information seeking by undergraduate information management students. It describes how they found and used information, and explores their motivation and decision making. We employed a use‐in‐context approach where students were observed conducting, and were interviewed about, information‐seeking tasks carried out during their academic work. We found that participants were reluctant to engage with a complex range of information sources, preferring to use the Internet. The main driver for progress in information seeking was the immediate demands of their work (e.g., assignments). Students used their growing expertise to justify a conservative information strategy, retaining established strategies as far as possible and completing tasks with minimum information‐seeking effort. The time cost of using library material limited the uptake of such resources. New methods for discovering and selecting information were adopted only when immediately relevant to the task at hand, and tasks were generally chosen or interpreted in ways that minimized the need to develop new strategies. Students were driven by the demands of the task to use different types of information resources, but remained reluctant to move beyond keyword searches, even when they proved ineffective. They also lacked confidence in evaluating the relative usefulness of resources. Whereas existing literature on satisficing has focused on stopping conditions, this work has highlighted a richer repertoire of satisficing behaviors.

The StoryBank project is examining technologies and practices to allow digitally impoverished communities to take part in the user-generated content revolution. The approach involves combining mobile phones to create audio-visual stories and a touch screen display situated in a community meeting place. This paper discusses the design, evaluation and refinement of the situated display. We consider how our experiences of working with a rural Indian village community influenced design processes, principles and prototypes. The work highlights the value of community-centred design practices and prototypes in such developing-world contexts.

Mobile search is becoming an increasingly important user activity. In this paper, instead of investigating the most efficient and effective ways of providing search results, the answers, we consider the value of giving access to previous queries, the questions, relating to a user's location. By exposing what other people have searched for, the aim is to provide useful insights into a location's character. To consider the value of the approach we deployed two mobile probes in a large-scale field study involving 391 participants. Our experiences suggest that presenting users with other people's in situ queries influences their information seeking interactions positively.

There is much interest in providing effective mobile search tools. Our focus is the value of in-situ sharing of users' mobile search activity. The QnotA prototype displays other people's queries about locations in an attempt to both provide users with an enriched sense of the places they visit, and to accommodate the limited input and output capabilities of many mobile platforms. We present the prototype and user experiences it affords. A study has been performed which allowed us to gather logged usage data and subjective participant information via diary and interview protocols. We report on findings that give insights as to the use and usefulness of the approach.

Abstract A user's understanding of the libraries they work in, and hence of what they can do in those libraries, is encapsulated in their “mental models” of those libraries. In this article, we present a focused case study of users' mental models of traditional and digital libraries based on observations and interviews with eight participants. It was found that a poor understanding of access restrictions led to risk‐averse behavior, whereas a poor understanding of search algorithms and relevance ranking resulted in trial‐and‐error behavior. This highlights the importance of rich feedback in helping users to construct useful mental models. Although the use of concrete analogies for digital libraries was not widespread, participants used their knowledge of Internet search engines to infer how searching might work in digital libraries. Indeed, most participants did not clearly distinguish between different kinds of digital resource, viewing the electronic library catalogue, abstracting services, digital libraries, and Internet search engines as variants on a theme.

Abstract Almost all Web searches are carried out while the user is sitting at a conventional desktop computer connected to the Internet. Although online, handheld, mobile search offers new possibilities, the fast‐paced, focused style of interaction may not be appropriate for all user search needs. The authors explore an alternative, relaxed style for Web searching that asynchronously combines an offline handheld computer and an online desktop personal computer. They discuss the role and utility of such an approach, present a tool to meet these user needs, and discuss its relation to other systems.

Small handheld devices—mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc.—are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Google™ index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2–3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice.

Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and --- more constructively --- suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services. Key words: Mobile internet, HCI, Usability, WAP. 1.