Mobile information re-finding as a continuing dialogue

ABSTRACT

Mobile users have many needs to re-find information across a variety of computing devices, locations, and situations. My research explores two areas to support mobile information re-finding. First, I am investigating how users re-find information first found on the web: how people approach re-finding, what information they recall when trying to re-find, and how they converse about re-finding. Second, I am examining how shared context can be established and utilized between a user and a computer system to improve future re-finding interactions. In this paper, I present two efforts to explore these areas. I briefly describe a prototype system to support mobile information re-finding through a telephone-based voice interface, and then present preliminary results from a study of how people converse when engaging in collaborative information refinding tasks with another person. The results of this study suggest that context plays an important role in re-finding.

REFERENCES

• 1: Daniel Billsus , Clifford A. Brunk , Craig Evans , Brian Gladish , Michael Pazzani, Adaptive interfaces for ubiquitous web access, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.5, May 2002 [doi>10.1145/506218.506240]
• 2: Robert G. Capra, III , Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones , Naren Ramakrishnan, WebContext: remote access to shared context, Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive user interfaces, November 15-16, 2001, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/971478.971517]
• 3: K. S. Hone , C. Baber, Designing habitable dialogues for speech-based interaction with computers, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.54 n.4, p.637-662, April 2001 [doi>10.1006/ijhc.2000.0456]
• 4: William Jones , Harry Bruce , Susan Dumais, Keeping found things found on the web, Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management, October 05-10, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/502585.502607]
• 5: Mark Perry , Kenton O'hara , Abigail Sellen , Barry Brown , Richard Harper, Dealing with mobility: understanding access anytime, anywhere, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.8 n.4, p.323-347, December 2001 [doi>10.1145/504704.504707]
• 6: Maglio, P. and Barrett, R. (1997). How to Build Modeling Agents to Support Web Searchers. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on User Modeling (UM97, June 2-5, 1997). Springer Wien New York, 5--16.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Natural language

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors; Human information processing
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Voice I/O

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
information re-finding, mobile computing, shared context, speech recognition, voice user interfaces