Mobile interfaces: Browsing vs. searching vs. maps
Posted by Nancy Proctor on | August 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
I sent out a call via Twitter & Facebook asking for studies/experience/opinions on the different uses, strengths & weaknesses of different interfaces to content on mobile devices, especially for museum interpretation. I was excited to hear back from an old high school friend, Sam Kome, who, after 5ish years as a GIS consultant got an MS-IS with a lot of UI design and usability studies, followed by a stint at a content creator/broker for mobile phones, PDAs, etc (worked on the web and mobile storefronts for AT&T, Alltel, Verizon, Palm, Sprint). While there he did a study of 100+ device browsers ability to render various content. – So a very good source of expertise on the subject!!
Sam sent me the following thoughts with his kind permission to reproduce them here for public discussion:
Mobile devices: I’d say forget browseable map interfaces because despite the gassy press iPhones get they don’t represent much of the market, and American cell networks are still 20th century tech (they suck). I’d go with browseable tags which should be genera, and really a good search UI. What constitutes good tags and who likes to browse versus search are also great, big questions.
My stance on browsing versus search is fairly nuanced; I see them as sometimes complementary, sometimes unrelated activities. Really situational. What is the task? How important/urgent is a good result? How important is time?
Take a look at NYC and NYPL if you haven’t – they’ve put good thought into mobile map apps. Nutshell: we’re built for browsing, think hunting and gathering. Marcia Bates has a famous paper on ‘berrypicking’. It’s low-cognitive load for us. We look for generic terms and work up or down the info hierarchy: e.g. ‘tree’ > ‘pine’ > ‘loblolly’. Search is serious work: we have a set goal, a ‘known unknown’ (ty Rumsfeld), and we’ll know our answer when we see it. I would guess most museums are 80/20 browse/search environments, but that’s your area, not my mine ; )
What’s your take? I’d be particularly happy to hear more from Sam (including those links) and from the great folks at NYPL!
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August 26th, 2009 @ 8:07 am
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