REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users

TL;DR

This paper investigates user perceptions of current search interfaces across devices and proposes REFOCUS, a set of requirements for improving search interfaces on emerging devices, validated by experts.

Contribution

It introduces REFOCUS, a new set of requirements for future search interfaces tailored for novel devices and input modalities, based on user surveys and expert validation.

Findings

Users are satisfied with desktop and mobile search.

Skepticism exists towards search on novel devices.

REFOCUS addresses the need for improved search interfaces on emerging devices.

Abstract

While smartphones are widely used for web browsing, also other novel devices like Smart TVs become increasingly popular. Yet, current interfaces do not cater for the newly available devices beyond touch and small screens, if at all for the latter. Particularly search engines -- today's entry points of the WWW -- must ensure their interfaces are easy to use on any web-enabled device. We report on a survey that investigated (1) users' perception and usage of current search interfaces, and (2) their expectations towards current and future search interfaces. Users are mostly satisfied with desktop and mobile search, but seem to be skeptical towards web search with novel devices and input modalities. Hence, we derive REFOCUS -- a novel set of requirements for current and future search interfaces, which shall address the demand for improvement of novel web search and has been validated by 12 dedicated experts.