Category-Based Interfaces for Mobile Search

Abstract

One of the challenges with designing effective mobile search interfaces is how to present and explore the search results. Category-based result organization and presentation techniques have been suggested in literature as a complement to the traditional ranked result list. In the mobile context categories can facilitate information access by providing an overview of the result set, by reducing the need for keyword entry and by providing means to filter the results. This chapter includes a review of recent research on category-based interfaces for mobile search. The chapter also addresses the challenges of evaluating mobile search in situ and presents a longitudinal user study that investigated how a mobile clustering interface is used to search the Web. Results from the study show that category-based interaction can be situationally useful, for example when users have problems describing their information need or wish to retrieve a subset of results. In summary, the chapter proposes future research directions for category-based mobile search interfaces.