Special Lecture

FaThumb: A Facet-based Interface for Mobile Search

Wednesday, October 4, 2006
12:30 pm to 2:00 pm
Amy Karlson

Mobile phones are poised to be the world's most widespread technology. Recent studies predict over 1 billion cell phones will be sold in 2006, while mobile phones already outnumber land lines, personal computers and even people in some counties! As the mobile user base expands, so do device storage capacities and wireless services. Not only are cell phones accumulating more device-resident data, but they are increasingly used as front-end interfaces to ever-larger external data sets. Yet the technologies and services have advanced much faster than solutions for addressing the usability challenges inherent in accessing large data stores from devices with limited input and output capabilities. Most of today's mobile search interfaces are modeled after desktop-based approaches, which I will argue are not well-suited to today's devices and mobile scenarios.

In my talk I'll present FaThumb ("fathom"), an interface I have developed with Microsoft Research to address the potential deficiencies of current phone-based search interfaces. Inspired by the successes of facet-based search, FaThumb supports fluid data filtering via a keypad-mapped hierarchy of data attributes (facet navigation). I will demonstrate FaThumb as well as describe a formative study we conducted to understand the relative value of facet navigation versus traditional keyword entry for different types of mobile search tasks.

Last updated:

March 26, 2015