Karen Church

What's up with whatsapp?: comparing mobile instant messaging behaviors with traditional SMS

With the advent of instant mobile messaging applications, traditional SMS is in danger of loosing its reign as the king of mobile messaging. Applications like WhatsApp allow mobile users to send real-time text messages to individuals or groups of friends at no cost. While there is a vast body of research on traditional text messaging practices, little is understood about how and why people have adopted and appropriated instant mobile messaging applications. The goal of this work is to provide a deeper understanding of the motives and perceptions of a popular mobile messaging application called WhatsApp and to learn more about what this service offers above and beyond traditional SMS. To this end, we present insights from two studies an interview study and a large-scale survey highlighting that while WhatsApp offers benefits such as cost, sense of community and immediacy, SMS is still considered a more reliable, privacy preserving technology for mobile communication.

Understanding the intent behind mobile information needs

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular as a means of information access while on-the-go. Mobile users are likely to be interested in locating different types of content. However, the mobile space presents a number of key challenges, many of which go beyond issues with device characteristics such as screen-size and input capabilities. In particular, changing contexts such as location, time, activity and social interactions are likely to impact on the types of information needs that arise. In order to offer personalized, effective mobile services we need to understand mobile users in more detail. Thus we carried out a four-week diary study of mobile information needs, looking in particular at the goal/intent behind mobile information needs, the topics users are interested in and the impact of mobile contexts such as location and time on user needs.

Mobile information access: A study of emerging search behavior on the mobile Internet

It is likely that mobile phones will soon come to rival more traditional devices as the primary platform for information access. Consequently, it is important to understand the emerging information access behavior of mobile Internet (MI) users especially in relation to their use of mobile handsets for information browsing and query-based search. In this article, we describe the results of a recent analysis of the MI habits of more than 600,000 European MI users, with a particular emphasis on the emerging interest in mobile search. We consider a range of factors including whether there are key differences between browsing and search behavior on the MI compared to the Web. We highlight how browsing continues to dominate mobile information access, but go on to show how search is becoming an increasingly popular information access alternative especially in relation to certain types of mobile handsets and information needs. Moreover, we show that sessions involving search tend to be longer and more data-rich than those that do not involve search. We also look at the type of queries used during mobile search and the way that these queries tend to be modified during the course of a mobile search session. Finally we examine the overlap among mobile search queries and the different topics mobile users are interested in.

An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications

Notifications on mobile phones alert users about new messages, emails, social network updates, and other events. However, little is understood about the nature and effect of such notifications on the daily lives of mobile users. We report from a one-week, in-situ study involving 15 mobile phones users, where we collected real-world notifications through a smartphone logging application alongside subjective perceptions of those notifications through an online diary. We found that our participants had to deal with 63.5 notifications on average per day, mostly from messengers and email. Whether the phone is in silent mode or not, notifications were typically viewed within minutes. Social pressure in personal communication was amongst the main reasons given. While an increasing number of notifications was associated with an increase in negative emotions, receiving more messages and social network updates also made our participants feel more connected with others. Our findings imply that avoiding interruptions from notifications may be viable for professional communication, while in personal communication, approaches should focus on managing expectations.

Understanding mobile web and mobile search use in today's dynamic mobile landscape

The term mobile Web is changing. Mobile is traditionally associated with on-the-move, portable and dynamic. However, with the advent of smartphones, an increasing number of users are accessing the mobile Internet via their phone while in more stationary and familiar settings, like at home or at work. This shift in the meaning of mobile is having a significant effect on mobile Web behavior. Designing great mobile Web experiences requires a deeper understanding of the information needs, behaviors and underlying motivations of mobile users. As such, the goal of this work is to study this shift and its impact on mobile Internet access, with a view to determining what this means for the future of the mobile Web and in particular mobile search. In this paper we present the results of an online diary and interview study of 18 active mobile Web users over a 4-week period focusing on how, why, where and in what situations people use the mobile Internet and mobile search. Our findings raise a new set of open research questions and point to a number of implications for enriching the experiences of mobile Web users.

A large scale study of European mobile search behaviour

Recent evidence suggests that mobile search is becoming an increasingly important way for mobile users to gain access to online information, especially as off-portal content continues to grow rapidly. In this paper we study the characteristics of mobile search by analysing approximately 6 million individual search requests generated by over 260,000 individual mobile searchers over a 7-day period during 2006. We analyse the patterns of queries used by mobile searchers and focus on key characteristics such as the clickthru rates of mobile searches in order to understand, for the first time, just how well mobile search engines are responding to user queries. Moreover, we compare our results to a number of recent mobile studies and highlight some of the key differences between mobile search and traditional Web search behaviours.

Climbing the app wall: enabling mobile app discovery through context-aware recommendations

The explosive growth of the mobile application (app) market has made it difficult for users to find the most interesting and relevant apps from the hundreds of thousands that exist today. Context is key in the mobile space and so too are proactive services that ease user input and facilitate effective interaction. We believe that to enable truly novel mobile app recommendation and discovery, we need to support real context-aware recommendation that utilizes the diverse range of implicit mobile data available in a fast and scalable manner. In this paper we introduce the Djinn model, a novel context-aware collaborative filtering algorithm for implicit feedback data that is based on tensor factorization. We evaluate our approach using a dataset from an Android mobile app recommendation service called appazaar. Our results show that our approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art collaborative filtering methods.

SocialSearchBrowser: a novel mobile search and information discovery tool

The mobile Internet offers anytime, anywhere access to a wealth of information to billions of users across the globe. However, the mobile Internet represents a challenging information access platform due to the inherent limitations of mobile environments, limitations that go beyond simple screen size and network issues. Mobile users often have information needs which are impacted by contexts such as location and time. Furthermore, human beings are social creatures that often seek out new strategies for sharing knowledge and information in mobile settings. To investigate the social aspect of mobile search, we have developed SocialSearchBrowser (SSB), a novel proof-of-concept interface that incorporates social networking capabilities with key mobile contexts to improve the search and information discovery experience of mobile users. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory field study of SSB and outline key implications for the design of next generation mobile information access services.

Who, what, where & when: a new approach to mobile search

Mobile devices and the mobile Internet represent an extremely challenging search environment. Limited screenspace, restricted text-input and interactivity, and impatient users all conspire to exacerbate the shortcomings of modern Web search. Recently researchers have proposed that typically vague search queries be augmented by context information, as a way to help search engines to retrieve more relevant information. In this paper we propose a novel interface to support multi-dimensional, context-sensitive mobile search, combining context features such as location, time, and community preferences to offer a unique search experience that is well-adapted to the needs of mobile users.

Understanding mobile information needs

In this paper we describe the results of a four-week diary study of mobile information needs, focusing on the intent behind mobile needs and the importance on context on such needs. We identified three key intents among diary entries: informational, geographical and personal information management (PIM). Furthermore, we found many of these information needs have high temporal and location dependencies.