166,976 research outputs found
Mobile Web Design and Usability
The purpose of this study is to identify the best practices in designing mobile website layouts. It includes research on the current design trends for the mobile web and discusses the future for mobile website interaction. It includes interviews of industry professionals who give their insight on experiences in designing and developing mobile websites. A user experience survey conducted compares a desktop version of a website to its mobile version counterpart, testing users’ preferences for mobile websites in the following areas: navigation, ability to search, and design. The results of this study can be used to improve the mobile web browsing experience through recommendations for mobile web development and design
Context modelling for just-in-time mobile information retrieval (JIT-MobIR)
Mobile users have the capability of accessing information anywhere at any time with the introduction of mobile browsers and mobile web search. However, the current mobile browsers are implemented without considering the characteristics of mobile searches. As a result, mobile users need to devote time and effort in order to retrieve relevant information from the web in mobile devices. On the other hand, mobile users often request information related to their surroundings, which is also known as context. This recognizes the importance of including context in information retrieval. Besides, the availability of the embedded sensors in mobile devices has supported the recognition of context. In this study, the context acquisition and utilization for mobile information retrieval are proposed. The "just-in-time" approach is exploited in which the information that is relevant to a user is retrieved without the user requesting it. This will reduce the mobile user's effort, time and interaction when retrieving information in mobile devices. In this paper, the context dimensions and context model are presented. Simple experiments are shown where user context is predicted using the context model
Mnews: A Study of Multilingual News Search Interfaces
With the global expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, users are becoming increasingly diverse, particularly in terms of languages. In fact, the number of polyglot Web users across the globe has increased dramatically.
However, even such multilingual users often continue to suffer from unbalanced and fragmented news information, as traditional news access systems seldom allow users to simultaneously search for and/or compare news in different languages, even though prior research results have shown that multilingual users make significant use of each of their languages when searching for information online.
Relatively little human-centered research has been conducted to better understand and support multilingual user abilities and preferences. In particular, in the fields of cross-language and multilingual search, the majority of research has focused primarily on improving retrieval and translation accuracy, while paying comparably less attention to multilingual user interaction aspects.
The research presented in this thesis provides the first large-scale investigations of multilingual news consumption and querying/search result selection behaviors, as well as a detailed comparative analysis of polyglots’ preferences and behaviors with respect to different multilingual news search interfaces on desktop and mobile platforms. Through a set of 4 phases of user studies, including surveys, interviews, as well as task-based user studies using crowdsourcing and laboratory experiments, this thesis presents the first human-centered studies in multilingual news access, aiming to drive the development of personalized multilingual news access systems to better support each individual user
Cross-display attention switching in mobile interaction with large displays
Mobile devices equipped with features (e.g., camera, network connectivity and media player) are increasingly being used for different tasks such as web browsing, document reading and photography. While the portability of mobile devices makes them desirable for pervasive access to information, their small screen real-estate often imposes restrictions on the amount of information that can be displayed and manipulated on them. On the other hand, large displays have become commonplace in many outdoor as well as indoor environments. While they provide an efficient way of presenting and disseminating information, they provide little support for digital interactivity or physical accessibility. Researchers argue that mobile phones provide an efficient and portable way of interacting with large displays, and the latter can overcome the limitations of the small screens of mobile devices by providing a larger presentation and interaction space. However, distributing user interface (UI) elements across a mobile device and a large display can cause switching of visual attention and that may affect task performance.
This thesis specifically explores how the switching of visual attention across a handheld mobile device and a vertical large display can affect a single user's task performance during mobile interaction with large displays. It introduces a taxonomy based on the factors associated with the visual arrangement of Multi Display User Interfaces (MDUIs) that can influence visual attention switching during interaction with MDUIs. It presents an empirical analysis of the effects of different distributions of input and output across mobile and large displays on the user's task performance, subjective workload and preference in the multiple-widget selection task, and in visual search tasks with maps, texts and photos. Experimental results show that the selection of multiple widgets replicated on the mobile device as well as on the large display, versus those shown only on the large display, is faster despite the cost of initial attention switching in the former. On the other hand, a hybrid UI configuration where the visual output is distributed across the mobile and large displays is the worst, or equivalent to the worst, configuration in all the visual search tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best (i.e., tied with a mobile-only configuration) in text- and photo-search tasks
Understanding search behaviour on mobile devices
Web search on hand-held devices has become enormously common and
popular. Although a number of studies have revealed how users
interact with search engine result pages (SERPs) on desktop
monitors, there are still only few studies related to user
interaction in mobile web search, and search results are shown in
a similar way whether on a mobile phone or a desktop. Therefore,
it is still difficult to know what happens between users and
SERPs while searching on small screens, and this means that the
current presentation of SERPs on mobile devices may not be the
best.
According to the findings from previous studies, including our
earlier work, we can confirm that search behaviour on
touch-enabled mobile devices is different from behaviour with
desktop screens, and so we need to consider a different SERP
presentation design for mobile devices. In this thesis, we
explore several user interactions during search with the aim of
improving search experience on smartphones.
First, one remarkable trend of mobile devices is their
enlargement of screen sizes during the last few years. This leads
us to look for differences in search behaviour on different sized
small screens, and if there are any, to suggest better
presentation of search results for each screen size. In the first
study, we investigated search performance, behaviour, and user
satisfaction on three small screens (3.6 inches for early
smartphones, 4.7 inches for recent smart-phones and 5.5 inches
for phablets). We found no significant differences with respect
to the efficiency of carrying out tasks. However, participants
exhibited different search behaviours on the small, medium, and
large sizes of small screens, respectively: a higher chance of
scrolling with the worst user satisfaction on the smallest
screen; fast information extraction with some hesitation before
selecting a link on the medium screen; and less eye movements on
top links on the largest screen. These results suggest that the
presentation of web search results for each screen size needs to
take into account differences in search behaviour.
Second, although people are familiar with turning pages
horizontally while reading books, vertical scrolling is the
standard option that people have available while searching on
mobile devices. So following a suggestion from the first study,
in the second study we explored the effect of horizontal and
vertical viewport control types (pagination versus scrolling)
with various positions of a correct answer in mobile web search.
Our findings suggest that although users are more familiar with
scrolling, participants spent less time to find the correct
answer with pagination, especially when the relevant result is
located beyond the page fold. In addition, participants using
scrolling exhibited less interest in lower-ranked results even if
the documents were relevant. The overall result indicates that it
is worthwhile providing different viewport controls for better
search experiences in mobile web search.
Third, snippets occupy the biggest space in each search result.
Results from a previous study suggested that snippet length
affects search performance on a desktop monitor. Due to the
smaller screen, the effect seems to be much larger on
smartphones. As one possible idea for a SERP presentation design
from the first study, we investigated appropriate snippet lengths
on mobile devices in the third study. We compared search
behaviour with three different snippet lengths, that is, one
line, two to three lines, and six or more lines of snippets on
mobile SERPs. We found that with long snippets, participants
needed longer search time for a particular task type, and the
longer time consumption provided no better search accuracy. Our
findings suggest that this search performance is related to
viewport movements and user attention.
We expect that our proposed approaches provide ways to understand
mobile web search behaviour, and that the findings can be applied
to a wide range of research areas such as human-computer
integration, information retrieval, and even social science for a
better presentation design of SERP on mobile devices
Using Machine Learning to Optimize Web Interactions on Heterogeneous Mobile Systems
The web has become a ubiquitous application development platform for mobile systems. Yet, web access on mobile devices remains an energy-hungry activity. Prior work in the field mainly focuses on the initial page loading stage, but fails to exploit the opportunities for energy-efficiency optimization while the user is interacting with a loaded page. This paper presents a novel approach for performing energy optimization for interactive mobile web browsing. At the heart of our approach is a set of machine learning models, which estimate at runtime the frames per second for a given user interaction input by running the computation-intensive web render engine on a specific processor core under a given clock speed. We use the learned predictive models as a utility function to quickly search for the optimal processor setting to carefully trade responsive time for reduced energy consumption. We integrate our techniques to the open-source Chromium browser and apply it to two representative mobile user events: scrolling and pinching (i.e., zoom in and out). We evaluate the developed system on the landing pages of the top-100 hottest websites and two big.LITTLE heterogeneous mobile platforms. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach reduces the system-wide energy consumption by over 36% on average and up to 70%. This translates to an over 17% improvement on energy-efficiency over a state-of-the-art event-based web browser scheduler, but with significantly fewer violations on the quality of service
Modeling Internet as a User-Adapted Speech Service
Proceedings of: 7th International Conference, HAIS 2012, Salamanca, Spain, March 28-30th, 2012.The web has become the largest repository of multimedia information and its convergence with telecommunications is now bringing the benefits of web technology and hybrid artificial intelligence systems to hand-held devices. However, maximizing accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of web applications, specially if it is concerned with facilitating access for disabled people. This way, natural spoken conversation and multimodal conversational agents have been proposed as a solution to facilitate a more natural interaction with these kind of devices. In this paper, we describe a proposal to provide spoken access to Internet information that is valid not only to generate basic applications (e.g., web search engines), but also to develop dialog-based speech interfaces that facilitate a user-adapted access that enhances web services. We describe our proposal and detail several applications developed to provide evidences about the benefits of introducing speech to make the enormous web content accessible to all mobile phone users.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-
C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02,CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485),
and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad
Understanding Mobile Search Task Relevance and User Behaviour in Context
Improvements in mobile technologies have led to a dramatic change in how and
when people access and use information, and is having a profound impact on how
users address their daily information needs. Smart phones are rapidly becoming
our main method of accessing information and are frequently used to perform
`on-the-go' search tasks. As research into information retrieval continues to
evolve, evaluating search behaviour in context is relatively new. Previous
research has studied the effects of context through either self-reported diary
studies or quantitative log analysis; however, neither approach is able to
accurately capture context of use at the time of searching. In this study, we
aim to gain a better understanding of task relevance and search behaviour via a
task-based user study (n=31) employing a bespoke Android app. The app allowed
us to accurately capture the user's context when completing tasks at different
times of the day over the period of a week. Through analysis of the collected
data, we gain a better understanding of how using smart phones on the go
impacts search behaviour, search performance and task relevance and whether or
not the actual context is an important factor.Comment: To appear in CHIIR 2019 in Glasgow, U
- …