Abstract—The widespread availability of mobile devices has
made information available to many on the go, making it a
valuable tool in everyday life. Their ability to look up
information on the fly and assist with a user's information
retrieval in a timely fashion make them a natural everyday carry.
However, a limitation of these devices is the lack of screen space
available to display information, thus presenting a potential
problem to this seemingly ideal device. A technique to present a
large amount of information, cohesively, is required to make
users’ search activities more convenient and effective. We
present visualization techniques designed for presenting lengthy
text-based documents on mobile devices. The system uses two
different visualizations, Overview and Detail. The Overview
shows the overall profile of search terms in the document(s). The
Detail View presents the requested information, clearly
displaying to the user what content is available. By utilizing this
two step approach, we can assist users' search activities by
making them more effective in their search concerning lengthy
text contents. A pilot experiment was conducted to evaluate the
effectiveness of these visual interfaces compared to a traditional
text-based interface. For a majority of measured items, the
testers showed a higher degree of satisfaction using the
visualization, that was developed to address the difficulties in
exploring text content on a small screen device. Although a
larger scale usability test is expected in the near future, our
initial study shows the feasibility of using multi-level visual
interfaces as a search-supporting tool to review lengthy text
documents on mobile devices.
Index Terms—Visual interfaces, visualization, mobile devices,
text content search.
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science, Indiana
University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA (e-mail:
welctb01@students.ipfw.edu, shorgd01@students.ipfw.edu,
kimb@ipfw.edu).
[PDF]
Cite: Todd Welch, Gregory Short, and Beomjin Kim, "Visual Interfaces Designed for Searching Text Content on Mobile Devices," International Journal of Knowledge Engineering vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 230-235, 2015.
