A comparative user study of faceted search in large data hierarchies on mobile devices

Abstract

We compare two approaches for exploring large, hierarchical data spaces on mobile devices using facets. While the first approach arranges the facets in a 3x3 grid, the second approach makes use of a scrollable list of facets for exploring the data. As concrete scenario, we use category hierarchies that are dynamically obtained from different, distributed social media sources. We have conducted a between-group experiment of the two approaches with 64 subjects (41 male, 23 female) executing the same set of tasks of typical mobile users' information needs. The results show that subjects using the grid-based approach require significantly more time and more clicks for completing the tasks. However, regarding the subjects' satisfaction there is no significant difference between the two approaches. Thus, if efficiency is not the primary objective, the grid-based approach might be of interest as it provides a navigation element that allows the users to see the exact position in the data space. This might be a very useful feature in scenarios where knowing the exact position is quite crucial such as browsing classification schemas in digital libraries or other formal taxonomies.