A field study on the usability of a nearby search app for finding and exploring places and events

Knip, Florian ; Bikar, Christian ; Pfister, Bernd ; Opitz, Bernd ; Sztyler, Timo ; Jess, Michael ; Scherp, Ansgar

DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1145/2677972.2677992
URL:	http://ansgarscherp.net/publications/pdf/C41-KnipE...
Additional URL:	http://publications.wim.uni-mannheim.de/informatik...
Document Type:	Conference or workshop publication
Year of publication:	2014
Book title:	MUM 2014 : proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia : 25-27 November, Melbourne, Australia
Page range:	123-132
Date of the conference:	26.11.2014
Publisher:	Loke, Seng W.
Place of publication:	New York, NY
Publishing house:	ACM
ISBN:	978-1-4503-3304-7
Publication language:	English
Institution:	School of Business Informatics and Mathematics > Practical Computer Science II: Artificial Intelligence (Stuckenschmidt 2009-)
Subject:	004 Computer science, internet
Abstract:	Commercial apps for nearby search on mobile phones such as Qype, AroundMe, Foursquare, or Wikitude have gained huge popularity among smartphone users. Understanding the way how people use and interact with such applications is fundamental for improving the functionality and the user interface design. In our two-step field study, we developed and evaluated mobEx, a mobile app for faceted explorationof social media data on Android phones. mobEx unifies the data sources of related commercial applications in the market by retrieving information from various providers. The goal of our study was to find out, if the subjects understood the metaphor of a time-wheel as novel user interface feature for finding and exploring places and events and how they use it. In addition, mobEx offers a grid-based navigation menu and a list-based navigation menu for exploring the data. Here, we were interested in gaining some qualitative insights about which type of navigation approach the users prefer when they can choose between them. We have collected qualitative user feedback via questionnaires. We also conducted a quantitative user study, where we evaluated user-generated logging data over a period of three weeks with a group of 18 participants. Our results show that the time-wheel can serve as an intuitive way to explore time- dependent resources such as events. In addition, it seems that the grid-based navigation approach is the preferable choice when exploring large spaces of faceted data.