Exploring Urban Events with Transitory Search on Mobiles
Per M. Nielsen, Jeni Paay, Jon M. Pearce, Jesper Kjeldskov · 2015
Searching for unknown urban events in the hope of making serendipitous discoveries has been the focus of multiple mobile tourist guide and recommender systems. This study investigates how transitory search can be used as an interaction mechanism for making such discoveries on a mobile phone. Our prototype, onMelbourne, returns a changing collection of urban events within physical and temporal proximity based on the setting and adjustment of search sliders by the user. Laboratory tests with 5 participants show that users understand transitory search for urban events and do make serendipitous discoveries. In addition we found that users fear missing out on events not shown by the system, and that the choice of labels on sliders impacts their understanding of a slider set halfway. The contribution of the paper is a better understanding of how transitory search can facilitate explorative behaviour when browsing for urban events on mobiles.