Mobile Re-Finding of Web Information Using a Voice Interface

TL;DR

This paper investigates how voice-controlled services can assist mobile users in re-finding web information, highlighting challenges, architectural considerations, and the importance of user-created annotations for effective information retrieval.

Contribution

It introduces WebContext, an exploratory prototype for voice-based web re-finding, and presents a study on user memory, request expression, and the role of annotations in mobile information re-finding.

Findings

Annotations are extensively used to support re-finding.

Users rely on URLs, titles, and descriptions as waypoints.

Explicit user context enhances re-finding effectiveness.

Abstract

Mobile access to information is a considerable problem for many users, especially to information found on the Web. In this paper, we explore how a voice-controlled service, accessible by telephone, could support mobile users' needs for refinding specific information previously found on the Web. We outline challenges in creating such a service and describe architectural and user interfaces issues discovered in an exploratory prototype we built called WebContext. We also present the results of a study, motivated by our experience with WebContext, to explore what people remember about information that they are trying to refind and how they express information refinding requests in a collaborative conversation. As part of the study, we examine how end-usercreated Web page annotations can be used to help support mobile information re-finding. We observed the use of URLs, page titles, and descriptions of page contents to help identify waypoints in the search process. Furthermore, we observed that the annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.