Mobile wayfinding and guide apps have become indispensable tools for navigating unfamiliar urban spaces. Such applications address targeted, "just-in-time" queries, but are not optimally designed for multi-point expeditions that can quickly build route and survey-level familiarity with a neighbourhood. We first conducted an experimental simulation involving a homebuying scenario to assess the usefulness of a popular mobile wayfinding and search application (Google Maps) for exploring a neighbourhood. We then designed a prototype application called Block Party that addresses a number of limitations of Google Maps for this purpose, and evaluated it in a second replica study. The results suggested that application designs that facilitate switching among distinct but synchronized navigation views such as Block Party might support more efficient usage and the selection of task-appropriate views, leading to better overall spatial awareness.

We present a study exploring privacy behaviours in mixed reality collaborative environments. We consider two scenarios involving hiding and sharing blended physical-virtual documents around a tabletop, under two vertical display conditions: a solo display showing the remote collaborator as an avatar, and circumambient displays showing the rest of the connected virtual environment. We explore four types of cues (interactive, communication-based, ambient, and infrastructure) and their impact on how collaborators hide and share blended physical-virtual documents. Many participants did not obviously develop a sense that the physical and virtual surroundings were fused; as a result, certain physical privacy behaviours (e.g., orienting one's body to shield documents from the remote collaborator) were less apparent in the study. However, the circumambient displays generated curiosity about how the spaces were connected, and episodes where breaches were enacted or the spatial correlation was otherwise suggested led some participants to trust the environment less. On the table, the presence of fiducial markers and digital document "shadows" served to cue participants about the impact of hiding and sharing physical documents, however accidental breaches usually went unnoticed.

We present findings from a qualitative study of the spatial practices of biological fieldwork. We argue that these fieldwork practices inform a vision of decentralized spatial annotation in which a variety of motivations, needs, and perspectives coexist, and may support each other synergistically. We contrast this with current and past designs of mobile spatial annotation systems in the literature. From our analysis we identify three guidelines for mobile annotation systems design in biological fieldwork that we argue also extend to other domains: allowing the management of space through user control over annotation processes, promoting structured but flexible annotation through user-defined annotation formats, and providing robust and comprehensive integration of disparate data sources to allow ad hoc, exploratory queries.

Today, people perform many types of tasks on the web, including those that require multiple web sessions. In this article, we build on research about web tasks and present an in‐depth evaluation of the types of tasks people perform on the web over multiple web sessions. Multisession web tasks are goal‐based tasks that often contain subtasks requiring more than one web session to complete. We will detail the results of two longitudinal studies that we conducted to explore this topic. The first study was a weeklong web‐diary study where participants self‐reported information on their own multisession tasks. The second study was a monthlong field study where participants used a customized version of Firefox, which logged their interactions for both their own multisession tasks and their other web activity. The results from both studies found that people perform eight different types of multisession tasks, that these tasks often consist of several subtasks, that these lasted different lengths of time, and that users have unique strategies to help continue the tasks which involved a variety of web and browser tools such as search engines and bookmarks and external applications such as Notepad or Word. Using the results from these studies, we have suggested three guidelines for developers to consider when designing browser‐tool features to help people perform these types of tasks: (a) to maintain a list of current multisession tasks, (b) to support multitasking, and (c) to manage task‐related information between sessions.

Users are now performing more sophisticated web tasks. In this work, we explore web tasks that require multiple web sessions to complete (multi-session tasks) to satisfy a goal. We conducted a web-based diary study and a field study that used a customized version of Firefox which logged the participants' interactions for multi-session tasks and all their web activity. We found that multi-session tasks occur frequently and that users utilize a variety of browser tools and actions to help complete these tasks.

We present results from a study examining the sensitivity of group navigation strategies to changes in route presentation on a shared mobile device. Two content-equivalent interfaces are compared. An interface providing textual instructions linked to regions on a route map yields reliance on text primarily, encouraging route planning and a divide-and-conquer strategy we term 'navigator and scout'. An interface combining text instructions with map segments on individual pages yields less planning, still permits nav/scout, and sees an increase in an ad-hoc 'sync and go' strategy involving more gathering around the device. Finally, when the route map is used without text, the frequency of the nav/scout strategy drops markedly as sync and go increases.

In this paper, we present a field study comparing software-based navigation techniques (scrollbars, tap-and-drag, and touch-n-go) on mobile devices. In particular, we were interested in exploring the efficiency and user preference of these navigation techniques for different levels of mobility (sitting, walking, and standing) in a naturalistic environment. Results show that while there was no significant difference in performance between tap-and-drag and touch-n-go, both techniques significantly outperformed scrollbars for simple, multi-directional navigation tasks. In addition, the users preferred the touch-n-go technique over the other two methods. The results also revealed that users' interactions and preferences differed between the levels of mobility.