How Do Users Search the Mobile Web with a Clustering Interface?

Category-based search result organization holds promise as a means of facilitating mobile information access. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal user study that investigated how a mobile clustering interface is used to search the Web. The author describes the participants’ search behavior and discusses the benefits and limitations of category-based result access. Study results show that category-based interaction was considered situationally useful, for example when the participants had problems describing their information need or needed to retrieve a subset of results. The paper proposes design guidelines for category-based mobile search interfaces. These include improved strategies for presenting the categories in the search interface, the need to improve the categorization methods to provide more representative category structures, and accounting for the contextual aspects of mobile information needs.